Invitation To The Tron Legacy The Sound Show
In attendance, among the MANY people jamming the Fantasia Theater at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, CA was me, Frank Rogala, and the panelists: Steve Boeddeker, Jason Bentley, Gary Rizzo, James Haygood, Gwendolyn Whittle.
Somehow I was lucky enough to be on the email invitation list for this presentation.
I admit I was pretty blown away by the sound design and score by Daft Punk and the overall spacial audio effects of Tron Legacy let alone the hypnotizing "sit back in your seat and hold tight" entertainment that this movie provides.
What I learned:
1. Tron was a trailer, not a screenplay. They created the look, sound and feel of the trailer to see if there was interest and money to make the film. We got to see the original teaser that was only seen by Disney executives, employees and of course enthusiasts at Comic-Con. It looked surprisingly much like the final movie, light cycles, discs, suits and all. After the "teaser" garnered enthusiastic response, the movie was green lit. They then, intelligently took the small (tiny) team that made the "teaser" and expanded from there, retaining the spark that excited the audiences that saw the original inspirational visualization of the new look, feel and sound of the Tron universe.
2. There was an actual meeting between Daft Punk and Has Zimmer. He imparted tips on scoring to Daft Punk who had no prior experience at anything of this nature (though one of the members of the group had scored a reportedly disturbing indy French (?) film). When an audience member asked Jason Bentley if the advice was "asked for" or "given," Jason replied curtly, "... given."
3. Part of the sound montage that became the light cycles forming was made with a deck of cards (obtained from Circus Circus) by sound designer Steve Boeddeker.
4. I was thrilled to hear first hand from the re-recording mixer Gary Rizzo what he did in a technical fashion to give the film its extremely huge dimensional acoustic feeling. To boil it down, he use separate pairs (and processors) to create a delay and reverb with different settings on each of the 3 stereo pairs in the 7.1 mix.
5. I mark this as "most fascinating thing I learned." Those suits with the glowing stripes - you know, they light up like something done as an effect. Well they weren't effects, the suits actually lit up. Not only did they light up, they hummed. A tone. Two suits, two tones. If the suits move closer the tones interacted and jumped around to different harmonics. It was quite unnerving. They played us clips of the raw dialogue. The actors were a bit addled by it at first, but I guess everyone adjusted. The only problem was this was an extremely difficult moving target of background noise to eliminate, without filtering the vocals within an inch of their lives (early temporary rough filtering make the dialog sound like it was underwater). To the rescue something new and mysterious to me called the Nova system or effect or noise reduction. I got that there was a specific engineer (I believe with a woman's name) who amazingly mostly cleaned it all up. The before and after demonstration was quite remarkable. However, there were places where even Nova was not enough (it apparently didn't do well with wind or wider spectrum noises), and where they just had to cover it with effects and sound design. It made me realize that even in a high priced, high tech film they still have to struggle with the age old issues of cleanly recording the sound of human voices.
The evening was a fascinating glimpse at early stages of the film's development with identical passages shown as the sound design took form as well as other elements of the production put the icing on the cake.
As the panelists explained how the development of the final sound design might have gone through perhaps a half dozen hands, or more, I got a bit of a sense of the challenges posed by the sound design of this film. For me the presentation was a demonstration of the triumph of talented, creative people who together created something that has the power to immerse you in an experience of beauty, violence, drama and hope.
p.s. I also learned where the token "Wilhelm scream" is located. If you don't know what that is, look it up. Its a pretty funny "inside" story, that is Hollywood's worst kept secret. You might just enjoy being "in" on the joke.