Sound Affects
Adam Lacey talks to sound supervisor Patrick Drummond, Foley artist Caoimhe Doyle and composer/sound designer Giles Packham about that vital dimension of cinema: sound.

The last creative brushstroke that is put onto a film is the soundtrack. This can be a beautifully thought-out process, calling on the talents of many people working at this end of a film’s life. A real joy can be felt as life is breathed into a film story conceived of many years before...’

In these words, Patrick Drummond, Ardmore’s veteran sound editor with over 30 years experience, sums up the joys and motivations of working in the (often unfairly overlooked) sound department.

Can you imagine Jaws without that score? Apocalypse Now without its bombastic, visceral sound effects? Psycho without those grating strings as Janet Leigh is mercilessly knifed in the shower? Sound is undoubtedly a vital element of film production, but does anyone actually acknowledge this? From Jack Foley’s first tentative steps on The Phantom of the Opera and Dracula in the mid 1920s and early 1930s, to the highly developed sound editing of masterworks like No Country for Old Men and the scores of the Star Wars films, sound is integral to the film-going experience, but is not always treated as such.

Giles Packham, music composer and managing director of Waveform Studios in Dublin tells me: ‘Sound is 50% of the experience but it sometimes only gets 1% of the budget. Spending all the money on the visual aspect is short-sighted. Good sound and music can tell a story that the picture can’t always communicate on its own.’

Patrick Drummond elaborates on the collaboration between sound post-production and filmmakers. ‘The production of the soundtrack begins by meeting the director and film editor after the film has been shot and the process has moved to the cutting room. This is where the sound supervisor receives the director’s ideas on the film’s soundtrack and then goes away to create it. The looming deadline can put the creative process under huge pressure, but working all hours of the day can produce some happy results – if the coffeemaker can hold out! The ideas begin flying into the hard-drives of the Pro Tools editing computer, and soon dogs and cats and screeching animals of all kinds are swirling into the film in a unique way that perfectly fits the film’s life. That’s one version of the story. Of course, another version is pile-ups of crazy sounds landing in a heap onto the soundtrack. What helps this process is meeting with the director to show him/her the work in progress and see how closely it resembles their ideas.’

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 127.