The Sonic Spread: Where were you working when Predator was going into production and how much time did you have to work on the film?

David Stone: I think I had just finished Hugh Wilson’s Burglar, a pretty funny Whoopie Goldberg picture that’s been largely forgotten. The year before, I was a pretty busy sound editor, but hadn’t yet supervised. In 1986 I worked on Solarbabies, Star Trek IV, Legal Eagles, Top Gun, and Crossroads.

We told Joel we couldn’t handle all of the FX, BG’s, Foley, and Predub supervision and give him the quality he was expecting, if we also had to handle Diaolgue and ADR. Customarily, a Supervising Sound editor is supposed to honcho all of that – everything except the music, of course. But here was a huge action job, with production sound shot near a freeway, and Arnold himself wanting very much to ADR a lot of lines for clarity. Joel had become a valuable client of Steve Flick and Richard Anderson, and we didn’t want him disappointed. We suggested that he contract out all of the dialogue supervision to another shop, specifically Norm Schwartz, so we could not lose FX time dealing with dialogue. Silver agreed, and that was a lifesaver. It was a humongous job for Norm, and also for all of us on the FX side.

TSS: How much creative freedom did you have with the film? Was Director, John McTiernan very hands on with decisions during the post production process?

DS: I hate to sound anti-intellectual about “creative freedom.” I have spent my whole life working in the arts, and now am teaching, so I feel qualified to comment about the question itself without dismissing artistic ideals: When you work on a movie, your job is to serve the movie’s needs and to pass your work in good shape on to the next person in the line who has to handle it. You don’t think about some agenda of personal creativity. You just find ways to solve problems, and everyone you work with is smart and creative. You deal with conflicts about time and money, and other people’s egos, and you just have to get the shit done. McTiernan had been an art school kid, and I could relate to that. I had been a fine arts undergraduate, majoring in printmaking and minoring in art history. McTiernan had a great compositional eye, I could see that. And I think he’s consistently been a great director, inventing a new genre that combined big action and smart, witty writing, stunts, special FX, and great comic acting. Creativity is everywhere on the raw workpicture, even with no viz FX. All we had to do is expand the ideas in sound… express the lively environment of the jungle, the logic of the sci-fi story elements, and the violence really, really well. Put the audience in the middle of this dream world. If you get the job done, it’s going to be creative work.

McTiernan was only then just learning to work with Post sound on a very sophisticated level. He worked with us in the customary spotting sessions, and (as I told Jake Riehle for designingsound.org) attended the predubs when he could manage the time. That’s what directors always do. They have a million distractions while you Predub, but they make it their business to be there all through the Final. John did what all the major directors do in Finals, including considering picture changes when you have 150 sound tracks to keep in sync. He tinkered with Alan Silvestri’s music tracks, too. They always want to experiment with music and FX during the dub, so editors and mixers have to be ready to accommodate that. But he was very, very empowering about our sound solutions to the movie’s challenges, so we always felt like we were on the right track for him.

I’m going to guess that we had about 10 weeks, maybe only 8. I have notes from an initial spotting session at the end of March, 1987, which would have been just a few days from my start. IMDB says that the picture was released 12 June 1987. I don’t know how accurate that is, but it’s logical for Fox to have a Summer Blockbuster out before the July 4^th weekend. We met with Joel Silver about the job. There was going to be a hell of a lot to do, and very little time before we had to begin Predubs.

TSS: What type of system did you work on while cutting for this film? How has your work flow changed from the 80′s until now?

DS: I believe, and we teach this at Savannah College of Art and Design, that if you maintain elements of traditional workflow, no matter what modern tools you have, you will attain the best craftsmanship. The faculty at SCAD has a very high percentage of working and retired pro’s in all creative fields, and I think we all stress this idea. Certainly we have modern digital tools, and when they revolutionize processes through the history of film, they change the timing of your work, and the size of the crew radically. But making the best sound for a movie is a social, not a technical enterprise. The people have to collaborate to create a great track, just as actors have to collaborate to make a wonderful scene happen. Baseball players have to practice together to make that beautiful 4-6-3 double play. They don’t sit at the computer and do it by themselves.

We don’t have books to study about this idea yet. I’m hoping that some of my scholar friends will write extensively about the historical change in movie sound in the last 20 years of the 20^th Century. To me, it’s a fascinating study. If you’d really like to “geek out” about how we did things, let me give you what I told designingsound.org regarding the antiquated tech:

“Mag. Everything was on magnetic film, to be cut on movieolas and Kems. You predubbed and finalled to multichannel “fullcoat” mag, and cut on mono single-stripe mag or two-track stereo fullcoat mag. Sound effects libraries were kept on 1/4” reel-to-reel tapes, usually the original generation of tape they were shot on in the first place. So I would audition library FX on these 1/4” reels, and always gave the sound editing crew a complete notebook, listing the choices and combos of FX they’d need for each scene. We “Supes” always broke the film down scene-by-scene after spotting with the filmmakers, and then translated those ideas to our FX and Foley crews. John Pospisil used an 8-track Otari tape deck at the time, to handle the special design of new Science Fiction FX. He could edit and combine elements from 1/4” tape, and run sound through a lot of processing hardware, mixing to the 8-track and then down to two. I guess that 8-track was running 1/2” tape. John also loved to use, among other cool gear, his beat-up old analogue Arp synthesizer.

One of this movie’s great features is the wonderful stereo BG’s of the rainforest. These were recorded for another movie by Andy Wiskes, and they were probably the earliest digital sound recordings for a movie done as a complete series in a remote location. Andy shot hours and hours worth of beautiful stuff on a Sony PCM F1 1st generation analogue to digital system. In those days (before DAT) you had to record all of the digital data onto videotape, the only medium with enough bandwidth to capture all of those ones and zeros. Although a smaller Sony Betamax 1/2” videotape deck was available for this system, Andy recorded to a much bulkier 3/4” video deck, which he had to schlep through the jungle with all the other gear. He’s a strong guy. Andy’s wonderfully detailed sound logs often included notes about how many mosquito bites each take cost him. He’s such a pro, you never heard him slapping at the bugs or complaining throughout the many hours of this stuff. I thought if carrying the 3/4” deck didn’t kill him, the mosquitoes would.

Andy licensed the jungle material to us and we transferred it to 1/4” for the Anderson-Flick-Mangini library. Richard Anderson took on the task of cutting these BG’s. He orchestrated all of their surround layout, the progress from light to denser jungle, the way the animals would freak out or be silent, the individual touches of parrots or howler monkeys, or what have you. A happy moment for us was when the music mixer, Kevin Cleary said to me, in his “Aussie” accent, “Tell your crew, Dave, thanks for not putting the kookaburra in your tracks. It only lives in Australia, but it shows up in all the jungle pictures. Africa, South America, India. People have been cutting the kookaburra in all these pictures since the 1930’s. Thanks for not doing it!” For me, part of the magic of this movie is Richard’s masterful background work. Don’t forget, a great deal of the production sound was shot near a freeway in northern Mexico, and didn’t really sound the least bit like a rain forest until Richard’s backgrounds put the audience there.

The other half of what makes this sound track outstanding to me is the Foley work of Vanessa Ament and Robin Harlan, with J.R. Westen mixing at Directors’ Sound, which is now the Chace Audio Foley stage. I had heard Vanessa’s, Hilda Hodges’ and Alyson Moore’s uncredited work on “Platoon” at the Academy’s theatre, and I marveled at how cleanly and stealthily the Foley seemed to match and enhance production. You have all this military gear rattling, and these three tiny women performing combat boot footsteps for big macho guys, and it never, ever seems fake sonically. So the military guys’ movement is one aspect of it. But Foley is always about the friction between characters and their environment. In “Platoon,” the Foley jungle always sounded incredibly lush and green. You knew these Foley Artists were not walking around on crispy 1/4” tape (a common substitute for grass back in the day) in the dirt pits, and whenever they would brush by the big palm leaves, it always sounded moist and lush… You could smell the chlorophyll everywhere. So I asked Vanessa to bring all that skill to our little sci fi picture. I told her what Flick had told me: “It’s Arnie in the Jungle with an Alien!” Every morning that the Foley stage was working, Vanessa and I would steal fresh vegetation from around the neighborhood; big-leafed plants and palm fronds, whatever green stuff we could find. As long as they weren’t potted in people’s yards, they were fair game. Vanessa worked in the Foley pits for 25 years, and teaches film sound to college students now. She wrote “The Foley Grail” (Focal Press,) the only book exclusively on Foley, about the whole craft developing through the hands and feet of these amazing sound performers.”

TSS: Was any worldizing performed to capture those jungle reverbs? If not, what process or hardware was used?

DS: No, we didn’t do any worldizing that I remember. The old-school Hollywood mixers always expected sound editing materials to come to them “flat;” no perspective, no EQ, just as clean and raw as they were originally recorded. You need to understand that this was a custom in analogue recording. Any premature processing of any sound would rob the mixer of quality control in the later stages of a mix. Everyone understood that in the magnetic sound days. It was like the Star Trek “Prime Directive,” a kind of Golden Rule. So mixers expected un-processed tracks, with the exception of special design elements, which they knew had to be worked over and auditioned before they were cut in to tracks for the mix. Rerecording mixers needed to control all of the EQ and reverb with their analogue tools. If everything came to them “clean,” they could guarantee a director some consistency. So on Predator, all the EQ and reverb decisions would come from Dick Overton, Kevin Cleary, and Don Bassman, and were done right there on their boards.

TSS: One particular scene in the movie that kicks way too much ass (if that’s even possible) is when the entire group is unloading their weapons into the jungle trying to hit the predator. Was there any gun recording sessions budgeted in for the project?

DS: We did not custom record any guns for this picture. The Anderson-Flick-Mangini library already had all the recordings I needed to make this movie sound great. Working with these genius sound guys, who I am proud to call good friends, made this easy. Their little company had done so many movies with custom-recorded weapons, that guns were the least of my worries. But what you do is, you make a “package” of two, three, four separate FX and designate them for a particular gun. That’s one task among the many that you might call “sound design.” Here is the story I told Jake Riehle (of Designing Sound) about the gatling gun:

“What you need to understand is that the production weapon fired so many rounds so fast that it created a very high frequency of explosions. I called the gun wrangler a few times while we were researching for our sound effects. He told me how many rounds, but I forget. Could it be as many as 400 rounds a minute? That would be about 6 1/2 explosions a second. That could be about right. Understand that a high frequency of explosions will create a high frequency of sound. We always feel intuitively that low-frequency sounds are more macho, or at least more threatening to audiences. The actual gun in production sounded high and raspy to us… not unlike a gasoline leaf-blower. That’s a very annoying sound on the street, but certainly not frightening. So John Pospisil had to resolve this for us. He and I auditioned a lot of shotguns and canons and other weapons. We ended up liking the sound of a .50 cal tank weapon, in the context of each single shot.

Now John P. had to construct something. If he built those FX out to 400 rounds a minute, we’d be back to having another leaf blower, so that wouldn’t work. The final sound results from two kinds of cheating for the sake of drama: One, the individual shots are bigger, deeper in middle and low-end modulation than the real gun; and (B), there are far fewer shots than 400 rpm. John had to layer a bunch of individual shots in clusters on the eight-track, so that none of their tails would be cut off. He went through this in several iterations, until we both felt that he’d reached the right sound, and that it repeated in a naturalistic way without sounding “cutty.” This is a great example of what I tell my students, “It has to sound like it needs to sound in a movie,” as opposed to prosaic realism. The other very effective part of the gun is the spinning cylinder when Bill Duke has freaked out and mowed down the forest, after Jesse Ventura is killed. The beauty of this moment is entirely from McTiernan’s direction and the film editing: His thumb is frozen on the button, and he finally lets it go, and it stops whirring. An incredibly dramatic moment! What we did was just to enhance the production gun, which sounded almost exactly like what you hear in the movie, just (being production sound,) not as articulate. We added a metal shop lathe spinning and then spinning down, and we added some metal switch FX, that’s all. The drama came from the staging of this. In this case sound FX works more like the sonic analogy to what makeup and lighting do routinely for an actor. I wish people could understand how much and how often sound effects and Foley are working in that subtle way in all professional movies. Usually, people and fans just perceive the biggest and most artificial sound effects. There’s a lot more to it.”

TSS: Predator is one of those films that has personally influenced me and my sound design. I was wondering if any previous films had influenced you before work began on the project?

DS: God, I wish I had an easy answer for you. I spend my life watching movies, like most of us movie fans. If you’re really deeply involved, there’s never enough time to catch up on all the great films, and as you get older (my son is doing this, too) you’ll find yourself looking farther back into movie history to deepen your knowledge, like the physicists looking back through Hubble to the beginning of time itself. I have a solid interest in silent film comedy, and in the “cusp” period when sound was new, and had not yet evolved customary ways of doing things.

Look at Hitchcock’s Blackmail, the first British talky. They made a second version of the silent picture they had just completed, for the few sound theatres that existed. Hitchcock had to invent “walla” and put in post-production “throwaway” dialogue lines when the actors were not on camera. There was no looping yet, and in his sync-sound new scenes, he had the Polish ingénue lip-syncing to a British actress who was on a hot mic., just out of frame. Look at Laurel & Hardy in The Music Box. As big stars of silent films, they survived the transition to sound very successfully. They’re still doing much of their best acting in mime, but the piano they’re constantly moving up that endless staircase is a treasure of sound design ideas. The prop shipping freight is probably just empty balsa wood, but we have to be reminded there’s a piano inside there. So the editor(s) cut in sounds of orchestra bells and other musical junk whenever the crate was moving. It’s not realistic, but it tells the story in a completely non-verbal way. Tell me that’s not “sound design.”

I have my own sound film favorites. I always loved Treg Brown’s sound editing on the Warner Bros. theatrical cartoons, and I first learned editing in the animation field at Hanna-Barbera. As a cartoonist and former inbetweener, I am always very close to animation. I started to notice sound moments could carry a film when the music would go away, (like in John Ford’s 1937 The Hurricane) or when there is no production sound (like in the 1933 King Kong, where modern movie sound design is invented by Murray Spivak.) I love the innovative early electronic sound work in the 1956 Forbidden Planet, where sound FX and music are inseparable. Of course there are plenty of things that knocked me out, innovative design ideas from the beginning of the Dolby stereo era; and stuff I’ve absorbed from my colleagues in the ‘80s’s and ‘90’s, too much to mention here. When you do this kind of work, you see that every reel of every movie presents a different challenge.

TSS: While the predator is tracking Dutch and others there is a cool oscillating synthesized sound right before firing. Can you elaborate on what was used for that?

DS: Do you refer to a sound detail wherein the Predator’s shoulder-gun builds up energy just before it fires? That build-up would have been built into John P.’s design for the gun, and he would have created that from a combination of electronic-equipment sound effects tape recordings and by synthesizing, along with the editing and mixing skills that have made John P’s work always special, original, magical, and even witty in their sound. He is one of the unsung geniuses in our field.

I’ll have to look at it again to be certain as to what you’re referring. I’m thinking about the gun that sits on his shoulder and aims itself at a target. You can see this when it shoots the ground animal while Arnold is covered in mud, and is guessing that Predator heat-seeking gear can’t “see” him.

So much of the foundations of drama are about tension-and-release. Some science-fiction weapons will give you the time to do a build-up of power. We always think of stuff like that as being similar to an electronic capacitor. Build-up, and then shoot. With these fantasy weapons, it’s often rather Freudian when you think about it. You might like to see some scanned images of the sound FX library pages that define and log this stuff, and you’ll see how Steve Lee found clever words to describe these sounds.

Here’s the fun part: John P. and Steve Lee, who was the sound FX librarian, are both very funny guys. John P., for instance, used to display his Academy Award on his kitchen table, with a bunch of cheap Japanese robot toys standing next to it, all arranged in order of height. The Oscar© at the center was the tallest, and looked in that context like the robot in Metropolis. John and Steve thought the gun reminded them of the gag in one of the Pink Panther movies where Sellers is wearing a terrible disguise as a pirate and he has an inflatable rubber parrot on his shoulder. The parrot always deflates just when he needs to intimidate some antagonistic waterfront characters. So we absolutely had to call this thing the “parrot gun,” didn’t we?

TSS: There are a few moments in the film where it sounds like the predator actually uses it’s own voice (“What the hell are you?”). Can you describe the design process there and what actor was used for the recordings. Checking IMDB it says Peter Cullin (Transformer’s Optimus Prime) was used but uncredited. Knowing how anyone can edit IMDB, I’m skeptical on this.

DS: First, about IMDB: They do their best to be accurate, but everyone should realize that this was a grass-roots internet newsgroup at first. It’s evolved greatly, but never mistake it for an official record! I still have one or two credits on mine that make no sense, and they’re titles I’ve never even seen. You take some time to correct it, but it just doesn’t get done. If you want accuracy, go to the Academy records. That’s what the Academy is for. However, you won’t see the uncredited things, and those are very, very important if you’re doing history. If you’re serious about research, you need at least these two sources, and more.

Second, I don’t recall there ever being a moment of the Predator’s “own voice.” I always thought he was synthesizing dialogue from the other characters, which would mean we used their dialogue tracks. I could be wrong, but I thought there was kind of an unstated rule in the story that he would only speak as other characters. He was the ventriloquist from hell, and not a funny one, either. To hear him in his own voice would be like hearing Charlie Brown’s teacher speaking, instead of that trombone warbling. I talked about the vocal reveals in my last interview, including the mention of Peter Cullen. But the alien does perform a blood-curdling scream at one point. My dim memory is that we mixed animal sounds with a human performance. Maybe Norm got a good scream from Peter Cullen. Maybe that’s what it was. As I explained to designingsound.org, the tracks for Predator’s P.O.V. processing dialogue were simply split out from their grouping with “normal” tracks, and we did this for Foley and FX, too. They ran through the mixer’s boards via old-school processing hardware, most commonly the old Eventide harmonizer, and a bunch of EQ. So during all the POV’s, you hear the processed DIA and Foley, but you also hear the Pred-a-vison interior FX.

TSS: And to please everyone out there, can you describe the design process for the Predator’s “predavision” (the whips, pig noises, pulsating/multiple heartbeat) and vocal language (clicks and using other characters voices as their own). Who came up with these ideas and did these classic sounds come during the first pass or were there other ideas that ended up being redesigned?

DS: Here’s my take on the famous clicks as I answered the same question from Jake (of Designing Sound):

“No idea it would become so iconic, but I understand why it is. And I can’t take credit for the clicking either. It was already in the soup when I arrived. If memory serves, and it usually doesn’t, that stuff came from Steve Flick in the earliest days before we began our work. It went into the editor’s worktracks, and it stayed there. Everybody loved it, so it only went through the slightest changes of sync, and EQ, through the entire job. That means it went through the dub on a special track that was neither dialogue nor FX. I noticed on IMDB that Peter Cullen, an actor who has done a great deal of animation work, among other things, contributed some kind of vocalizing for the Predator, and I don’t know exactly what that was. I was working on FX, BG’s and Foley. Norman Schwartz supervised all the ADR. I’ll bet he knows.

What exactly were the clicks? I don’t know. You’d have to ask Flick. I know him quite well, but every day for 23 years I forget to ask him about those clicks. I suspect it might have been one of his favorite Arizona cicada recordings, slowed ‘way down. To me it sounds like a giant insect rasping anyway, which is why it works so well as a design element for this hard-edged carapace-armored alien in the first place. The funny thing is how no one, and no group of people, ever sat down and agonized artistically over that sound. For all I know, because he is such a sound genius, Flick may have thrown it together in five minutes on the way to his car and forgotten all about it until he saw the movie.”

DS: Here’s my take on “Pred-a-vision,” as I answered the same question from Jake (of Designing Sound):

“From that first spotting session, I believe I understood what McTiernan needed there. They only had to tell us once at the spotting that this guy is a living organism, with electronic parts embedded, like a cyborg, or maybe the parts are in his suit or helmet. And John and Johnny Link and we sound crew all agreed that it didn’t matter what was part of the suit, and what was connected cybernetically to the being… the ambiguity would keep things scarier. So, we’re all smart guys, we got that. Futzing through the mask was done to all production dialogue, ADR, and Foley. We just split those tracks out on every POV shot. Foley and production ran through the old Eventide harmonizer on Don’s stage during the Finals. Don would have processed the DIA and ADR, and Dick would have processed the FX and Foley. But this is done in the Finals, so each of them can make delicate adjustments in their own stems. You didn’t want to process sounds with a delicate flange effect before you had the final context with music and everything else. That kind of processing would not have been committed to predubs. Our job as editors is to make sure those tracks are split properly and easily available to the mixers. So most of the POV is done this way. He watches them in the forest, he picks up the scorpion, those kind of shots. Now as to the Predator’s processing what he hears, such as where he mimics Sonny’s voice in progressive layers… That’s a special project. I think that John Pospisil and Norm Schwartz worked together on those pieces (as audio without picture) well before our final dub, so we’d have time for both Norm and McTiernan to audition and approve them, and not have any surprises during the final. I don’t remember if that’s the way we had set things up, but it certainly is what I would plan for today.

I’m not sure who first came up with the jokey reference “Pred-a-vision,” for these all-important POV shots, but I think it was Vanessa Ament. It quickly became a useful shorthand for everyone to use, because it obviously affected all of our cut tracks except for music, and when you’re sound editing this kind of a movie, there are hundreds of track units. Here’s the Pred-a-vision layout for all the POV’s whether or not there was Foley or dialogue running: There’s a base layer of hummy, buzzy electronic notes, created by John P., probably a combo of his favorite old synthesizers and whatever MIDI toys he had at the time. On top of that is the Predator heartbeat. I found an old glass flower vase with a very wide mouth. I put some water and a natural sponge inside it. John P. and I talked about how Predator should have a human-like heartbeat, but with something strange and alien in the rhythm. We decided maybe he had more ventricles than humans, or something.

Ezra Dweck helped me record the sponges squishing in odd rhythms. We gave that tape to John P. to play with. He processed and tweaked, and he would have had to edit my terrible sense of rhythm. So those “Predator heartbeat” tracks went into the library. We made stereo mag prints of the heartbeat, and I probably asked BG editors to cut two pairs of John’s hummy buzzy electronic BG for the underlying stuff. This way we could add a bit from the second pair to go in the surrounds. The piece de resistance for Pred-a-vision was the “SLAM-IN” effect that we needed to cross every film cut where his POV begins, no matter what else is going on. John made this beautifully threatening “WHOMP!” sound, probably on his 8-track with his broken old analogue hardware. There were a few variants, I think, so it wouldn’t get too old too fast. We always cut that as a pair of stereo pairs on mag. I was interested in trying to get a feel that the sound suddenly collapses inward from the wide shots, with wide-spread jungle BG’s, to this weirdly claustrophobic sense of being inside the guy’s alien body, or at least his helmet. I don’t think we ever got the directional effect. That would have necessitated a lot of detailed fussing in the predubs, getting the sound to move like that. Really didn’t have time. Anyway, I always thought that Fox TV stole that Whomp FX from our Predator materials, and used it thematically for some idiotic tabloid TV series, like “Hard Copy” (I can’t remember the actual title.) They certainly had access to our sound materials, and were the legal owners, so they had a right to do that, if they did.”

DS: What I’ve learned from working, you can’t really learn in a classroom. When you get older, you begin to see the quality difference between technical training and life’s lessons. It’s easy to share my enthusiasm for really cool ideas in movie sound with students, of course. The small handful of movie sound pro’s who have now retired to teach full-time, all work hard to become better teachers. We can’t just stand in a classroom and tell endless “war stories” when we’re hired to be professors. Having said that, I find that we have to constantly steer our students’ attention away from the “bright, shiny object” appeal of impressive sound effects and amazing software, and help them learn to see the broader picture. The best students will be developing critical-thinking skills, and will be able to analyze why what they’re hearing is what they can only describe as “awesome.” It’s a general truth that people need to learn the difference between actual skills and the tools you use to execute skillful work.

And our students learn to listen for the more mundane sound work, and figure out how it’s accomplished. There may be a misperception that sound design is nothing but the big and obvious sounds of violence or magic or sci-fi & fantasy, because that’s what sells sound in our pop culture. Sound professionals deal with so much more than you would imagine, just to make a movie sound like a movie.

I think we are all, or should be, serious students of movie sound. And now we’re on the cusp of a new thread of Cinema Studies scholarship, which specializes in sound. Rick Altman, Liz Weis, and Jay Beck have been doing this for a long time; three little pioneering voices. These scholars have bothered to talk to actual movie sound practitioners, whereas most of their scholarly predecessors did not. Keep an eye out for that to be growing, as the Millennial generation begins to study the great film tracks from the beginning of the Surround era. My own writing about this appeared as the ink-and-paper periodical Moviesound Newsletter, in the late ‘80’s. I’d like to publish that old stuff some day.

TSS: What are the biggest differences you find in someone having a proper education versus on the job training and how can someone benefit from enrolling in a school like Savannah College of Art and Design?

DS: Interestingly, a number of the old-timers who were still around when I were a lad were pretty under-educated. Studio sound editors who learned their craft as a kind of blue-collar job they may have inherited from an Uncle or a family friend. There were very few film schools. Some of these guys probably didn’t even finish high school. But Dolby stereo, and the proliferation of new techniques in MIDI music and synth brought in a new generation of sound workers. Most of them had college educations, often in other branches of the Arts, and this informed a broader and deeper view of what movie sound could be.

SCAD is a university for the creative arts; a complete college education where our students are exposed to a community of painters, photographers, actors, production designers, etc. And Savannah, GA itself is an intensely arts-oriented and very beautiful town. The ambience here is very artistic, and the pace is slower and more contemplative than other places in my background. Our students can do sound work for SCAD student films with very fine actors and production design, and costumers, all of whom are in the process of learning to be competitive professionals. You should see the one-sheets for our student films that are designed and rendered by SCAD students majoring in commercial art, illustration, etc. These kids are ready for professional work. I say that having been an art student myself. Our students work intensely in this rich environment, and then both undergraduates and graduate students have a professional internship as part of their program, so they can get their hands dirty in real work situations.

This leads us to an easy conclusion: A young audio geek can get trained in recording arts techniques pretty easily at a vocational level. They can learn the signal flow and software that’s going to open doors for them to get jobs in recording studios and broadcasting. But they will not have the university education, and they will not go very far in their field. Our kids are the kind of critical thinkers, exposed to the ways in which all of the lively arts are integrated. A bunch of narrow technical specialties are not enough to make a movie. The broader vision that makes a classic movie has to come from understanding the coming together of all these other visual, verbal, sonic, and performance arts. Sound people’s thinking must not be isolated from all this.

TSS: Finally, have you seen Robert Rodriguez’s Predators and what keeps you busy these days?

DS: I have not had a chance to see it yet, though I’m looking forward to it. I try to keep up with new films and also spend time actively studying old films. If you don’t look both ahead of us and behind us, you won’t develop deep understanding. I just saw Inception, and I think Zimmer’s music completely destroyed what was otherwise a beautifully articulated sound track. It bullies its way into your ear. Doesn’t the director have any faith in his wonderful story, or in the actors? Chris Nolan used to make very good sound tracks, although he tended to have a very heavy hand in his taste for how music is mixed against everything else. He completely put me off with this in The Dark Knight. Sorry, but for ten bucks I get to hear some dialogue, FX, BG’s and Foley once in a while. Listen to any of the Peter Weir films, or to any of Carter Burwell tracks. It’s supposed to be a movie, not a fucking rock concert! It just keeps getting worse. You expect this kind of mix from Michael Bay, but not Chris Nolan.

My job as Chair of Sound Design at Savannah College of Art and Design keeps me very, very busy, both teaching and in administration. And I try to get around to all the new films I can, and am always studying the old stuff. I don’t think I’ve ever been bored for a moment since I was a little kid. There’s always a new rationalization available so that I have an excuse not to mow the lawn.

Please be sure to check out Designing Sound’s awesome interview with David here:  http://designingsound.org/2010/08/predator-1987-exclusive-interview-with-david-stone/