I always look as Murch as the Godfather of sound design, and beyond that somewhat of the Godfather in surround sound editing before it was thought of as surrond. I mean the movie Earthquake brought in the subwoofer idea to the extreme and the music industry brought int he concept of Quad sound - Murch, Lucas and Coppola sort of brought those ideas into Apocalypse Now.

In reguards to A.N I, for sure, think it helps that when you have also cut certian things you can have a different perspective on sound design than if you just sort of looked at already cut footage. Sort of the same concept as if you know how to act, or have acted, it makes you a better director. I hear things a lot and A.N helped guide me at an early age to look at the unseen - although I look back and relize most of what you heard in A.N was seen at some point or the other. With so many years of shooting on that film there was bound to be massive amounts of footage and the process of editing for sure is cutting out a lot of stuff. Now with ditigal the same can be said - people just tend to turn on the camera and shoot everything and, as is mentioned in these forums all the time, capture everything. Having worked in film and "touching film" and working on uprights and flatbeds I can for sure say a 90:1 ratio on certian things was (is) expensive as hell. A nightmare for editors if it is all printed.

Not from the book but something I think is a great comment on sound design and editing is from an interview with Murch about A.N -

We didn't have that many helicopters, but when you edit a scene, you cut it so that there seem to be eight helicopters over there, and -- here come another eight from this direction, and here are four more flying overhead from the north, and here are three more from the south. So eight plus eight plus four plus three is 23! And the funny thing is, that when I was cutting it, that didn't occur to me -- I knew it instinctively, but it wasn't conscious stuff. Then, when I set out to mix the film and talked to the sound editors, they said, well, these are coming from there, and you have to keep those sounds going when you bring in the other ones. It was like coming upon the Grand Canyon after wandering in the forest.

This is also one of my all-time favorites.

I can't help wonder how much he has benefitted from his years in sound design?
I suspect it made him much much more perceptive.

The shooting of Apocalypse Now was totally nutty, but it created a masterpiece and many of the people involved said it changed their lives permanently.

I really liked the Redux version. This makes more sense actually, although it was inevitable that I would hear from somebody behind me in the theater, "What are these #&*%@# French doing here in the jungle?"

How soon we forget...

Nice Christmas present Grazie :~)

Right on, Grazie. Walter Murch has contributed some wonderful insights into both film and sound editing in his several writings.

If you're not familier with them, you can find some excellent articles and interviews here online.

Happy New Year,

Jack

Thanks Jack! I'll read further, but what just caught my eye, and it having an echo in a thread over on the DMN forum was this, insightful, discussion on what is a transition.


. . . oh yes .. oh very yes!

Grazie

Grazie,

I heard an interview with Walter Murch on NPR's All Things Considered show back in November. He now does all his editing on a mac. Someone needs to introduce him to Vegas!

Here is the interview: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4994411

The French plantation scene was cool, but I thought the other added scenes in Redux just slowed the movie down.

If you saw the documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, Hearts of Darkness, Coppola was obsessed about getting all the details correct. This included getting the exact right kind of crystal wine glasses and even serving the wine at the right temperature.


I just saw Walter Murch on TV doing a Q/A from the Tribeca film festival. He said that opening of Apocalypse Now was not in the script, it was discovered in the editing. That famous shot of the helicopter dissolving into the ceiling fan, was something Murch came up with. He just found a great shot from the helicopter fight and found it just fit the mood and theme of film. They had been having trouble with the opening for a while. Then he put the helicopter sounds underneath the ceiling fan images. He said when he played that version back the first time, he almost fell off his chair.

The talk is available as an audiobook from audible.com. You can hear a ten minute sample here.

I'm reading a book about the Vietnam War, David Halberstam's The Best and Brightest. It starts with the Kennedy Administration and follows the progress of the war. The title is ironic. One thing I didn't know before reading the book was the Vietnam War was a late reprecussion of the McCarthy era. During the McCarthyism period our best experts on Asian in the State Department was smeared as being pro-Communist because they were giving accurate reporting that Chiang would not be able to hold China. Those who gave optimistic, but inaccurate reports were not smeared. It infected our outlook for a long time. It distorted our views also introduced the idea that China or Vietnam was "ours to lose." During the early years of Vietnam, if you said it was a mistake, your career suffered. If you wanted to get us in deeper, (which turned out to be a major mistake) you were usually rewarded. A similar phenomenon was going on within Vietnam. If you were a captain or a colonel and you submitted accurate reports that showed the weakness of the South Vietname regime your career could suffer. If you submitted inaccurate reports, things were much better. Doubts about the war were not a topic of discussion. The Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon Papers seemed to be full out hawk. But his personal papers showed he had great doubts on the war. He would only talk about them to one close friend and the Secretary of Defense. The papers were handwritten because expressing doubts about the war was so inflammatory that you could not have your secretary type it up or word may get around.

Someone just gave me The Conversations : Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film . It's a series of conversations between Murch and Michael Ondaatje, the novelist who wrote The English Patient who, it turns out, knows a lot about films.

Do you know how Walter Murch got the title of sound designer? He wasn't in the union so they would not let him be credited as a sound editor.

The book is a very interesting read. On the Godfather, the head of the studio didn't like the music and wanted to fire Nino Rota! It was over the scene with the horse head in the bed. Murch took the music played with structure and created a second musical line that was more dissonant like the studio wanted and Nino Rota didn't get fired.

He gives a lot of examples of sophisticated subtle sound design that he does where it works on a subliminal level. In the beginning of The English Patient, the patient bites into a plum and in the distance you a faint church bell. One minute later the movie flashes back to his memories. The bell is the first indication of a shift in mood. Murch also explained that in the first 10-15 minutes of the movie all the man-made sounds are explosions and crashes and sounds of horror. The bell is the first positive sound of civilization in the movie.

Ondaatje mentions after spending some time with Murch he went to see a film and noticed that every scene was a well edited gem, but the felt antiseptic like sealed off rooms of a house where each scene was self-contained and did not affect the others. He says Murch is always thinking how the small edit affects the whole film.

He says Murch is always thinking how the small edit affects the whole film.


.. oh yes .. .

Buster, thanks for the Amazon link.

Grazie