How 'Mank' and 'Soul' Sound Designer Returned to Old Hollywood and Then Visited the Afterlife - Hollywood Reporter

For his two most recent films, Ren Klyce re-created how a 1940s movie would have sounded and then imagined the aural feel of life before birth and after death.

Seven-time Oscar-nominated sound pro Ren Klyce, who was born in Japan and moved to Northern California at a young age with his parents, traveled all the way from 1940s Hollywood to an ethereal afterlife in the course of his work as supervising sound editor and rerecording mixer on his two most recent films, Netflix's Mank and Pixar's Soul. (He's also credited as sound designer on Soul.)

Klyce has been friends with Mank director David Fincher since they were teenagers and has worked on all of Fincher's features. The two met working on the George Lucas-produced Twice Upon a Time and, remembers Klyce: "We kind of clung to each other because we were the youngest people on the crew. David was doing visual effects. I was an art assistant back then."

For the director's latest effort, about the origins of 1941's Citizen Kane, Klyce says, "David wanted to have the look and sound of something that was made in the early '40s."

To achieve that with the quality they wanted, Klyce effectively created the soundtrack three times. "First, we made it as pristine as we could, as if we wanted it to sound like a modern-day film," he explains. "Then we took that entire mix, and we ran it through a process which we collectively called the 'patina effect,' where we aged that sound. That took a long time to get it old-fashioned in its sound. And the third sound that David wanted to have is [for] the audience to feel as if they were watching the film in an old-fashioned movie theater with an echo. That was the marching orders for the film: 'I want the movie to sound like it's old, it's monophonic, it's lousy, and I want it to sound like we're in the movie theater that's from the 1940s.' "

As part of that final step, Klyce projected the entire movie back on a scoring stage at Skywalker Sound, where he has worked since 1999. "It's got a 60-foot-high ceiling — which is really echoey — and we set up all these microphones and then we captured the reverb of the movie, so crazy, and then we added that reverb back on to the mix."

Pete Docter's Soul presented an entirely different set of challenges, as the movie follows Joe — a middle-school band teacher who dreams of becoming a professional jazz musician — in two very different environments: first, contemporary New York City, and then the film's imaginary pre- and post-life realms. "Pete knew he wanted to have a completely different palette of sound and music for [each] environment. So from the very get-go, we knew that it was sort of a complicated soundtrack in that it was almost like two movies."

Klyce says that when Joe falls through a manhole and enters the Great Beyond, it's "a very dark place with a little bit of humor because, as the souls go into this white shape, instead of dying by some horrible sound, we ended up going with the comical sound of a bug zapper."

But as he tries to escape back to earth, Joe lands in the Great Before, a tranquil environment where young souls find their personalities. Says Klyce, "It was really important to Pete at that point in the film that we, through the character of Joe, feel safe, feel peaceful and feel like this is a very relaxing, nurturing environment that cannot possess or present any form of danger whatsoever."

With that goal in mind, composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (they also composed the music for Mank) "went mostly with very sublime synthetic score," says Klyce. "Then, sonically, we treated that area organically with sounds from a wheat field and of children's voices and sounds that were pretty simple and organic and yet evoked this feeling of being outside in nature."

This story first appeared in the Feb. 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

"sound" - Google News
February 06, 2021 at 02:30AM
https://ift.tt/3p0Pus0

How 'Mank' and 'Soul' Sound Designer Returned to Old Hollywood and Then Visited the Afterlife - Hollywood Reporter
"sound" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2MmdHZm
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update