If there is a name that a student of editing or sound design needs to know, it has to be Walter Murch. The editor and sound designer responsible for movies such as The Conversation, The English Patient, Apocalypse Now, Cold Mountain -- just to name a few and for what he has won 3 Oscars, two of them he actually won for The English patient and actually that was the first time somebody won 2 awards for Best Film Editing and Best Sound. Walter discovered at an early age that he had a gift for sound recording, even though he didn't take his youthful experiments seriously until after he had explored other paths, including architecture and oceanography. Always eager to push things and see what happens, he found himself in good company at USC film school, where he met George Lucas, another graduate student whom instructors identified as a troublemaker for daring to challenge cinematic conventions. Impressed by Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal, a film Walter saw while at USC, he had the revelation that maybe he could create something equally moving and monumental and at the same time earn a living. When Walter was asked what his craft is all about he calmly responds; my job is to prod the attention of the audience to look at various parts of the frame by manipulating how and where I cut and what succession of images i work with and as a sound designer I analyze the design of the film in a three-dimensional space of the sound and come up with an approach that would work coherently with the image. When it comes to achieve the sound of the scene, according to Walter Murch, there are 3 rules for sound editing - emotion, story and rhythm.
Emotion - How will this sound affect the audience emotionally at this particular moment in the film? Giving the sound and emotional treatment can change how the audience see the image, the audience see a different image when it has been emotionally conditioned by the sound. The key, said Murch, is to look for something that will underline or emphasize the emotion that we as sound designers want elicit from the audience because it conditions the things that we are consciously aware of. For instance in the "The Godfather" the sound for the door at the end of the movie needed to give the audience more than the correct physical cues about the door; it was even more important to get a firm, irrevocable closure that resonated with and underscored Michael’s final line: “Never ask me about my business, Kay.” The image of a door closing accompanied by the right “slam”, indicated not only the material of the door and the space around it but also the emotional state of the person closing it.
Story - Does the sound move the story forward in a meaningful way? According to Murch a sound designer must make sure that the sound on the scene he is working on helps to progress the overarching story. Combining the right sounds with images to advance the demands of the story and theme, brings the motion picture alive. An example of a sound from the movie "Jarhead" help us understand this rule; there is a scene where Swofford character is in combat for the first time. There is an artillery barrage, everyone else duck for cover and he paradoxically stands up, the viewer is left with a close up of him, then in the distance there's a muffled explosion, followed by dead silence. This fleeting silence gives the sound editor a chance to put the audience in the battlefield. Jarhead's director, Sam Mendez, originally wanted the silence to stretch for several seconds but Murch came up with a better idea, tiny little pieces of dust and fragments hit Swofford's face in slow motion because according to Murch if you want to create the the sense of silence, it has stronger impact if you include the tiniest of sounds. Murch states that by manipulating what you hear and how you hear and what other things you don't hear, you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character.
Rhythm - Is the sound at a point that makes rhythmic sense? Sound is a temporal medium, the sound designer needs to take cues from the director, from the script, from what the actors are doing and the rhythms they're doing it in. According to Murch he tries to find the one or two key actors who are setting the tone for the film -usually the stars. Then he finds the rhythm of how they're doing things and use it to influence his own rhythms. Once you begin to really feel these rhythms, you can extend them into areas that may have few or no actors in them, states Murch. For example, a shot of a landscape, how long should that shot be? It depends on what the rhythms of the film have been up until then. A rule of thumb that Murch uses is never give the audience more than two-and-a-half things to think about aurally at any one moment. Now according to Murch those moments can shift very quickly, but if you take a five-second section of sound and feed the audience more than two-and-a-half conceptual lines at the same time, they can't really separate them out. There's just no way to do it, and everything becomes self-canceling. As a result, they become annoyed with the sound and it appears "loud" even at lower levels. However, if they "understand" the sound, they can easily take 105 decibels, 110 decibels. But he doesn't like to go that high; at the loudest points, he prefers to limit things to just nipping over 100 at most on a digital track.
Walter Murch's rules for sound editing were a high inspiration for my sound design class as well as his risk taker attitude but the most important advice I learned from him would be when he was asked to talk to young filmmakers about "success" and he said that we must see success as been based on three legs like a tripod that hit the ground, each of those legs have a name: one is luck, other one is talent and the last one is hardwork - although one of them will get us in the situation, as quickly as possible we have to get another one of those tripod legs on the ground to get our balance because the world is full of people with talent that were not lucky or didn't work hard who kind of wash out, so we need to recognize that any one of those legs will get us in the situation but our job in to get them all connected and keep them in balance.
