Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Sound Designed on
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1. Photo Courtesy of Paramount Pictures 2. Photo Courtesy of Paramount Pictures. Erik Aadahl recording sound from a bee hive. 3. Photo Courtesy of Paramount Pictures. On the Foley stage with Foley artists John Roesch and Allyson Dee Moore, joined by Mary Joe Stermer, Foley Supervisor Jonathan Klein, Ethan Van der Ryn and Erik Aadahl. 4. Photo Courtesy of Paramount Pictures. On Sony Studios' Cary Grant Stage, are Ethan Van Der Ryn (left), and Erik Aadahl proving that boys like their toys. 5. Photo credit: Robert Zuckerman. The Chevrolet Camaro that becomes the Autobot® Bumblebee™ returns in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. 6. Photo: Jaimie Trueblood. Shia LaBeouf (left) and Director Michael Bay (right) on the set of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. |
 Photo Courtesy of Paramount Pictures. The Autobot® Optimus Prime® once again does battle with the Decepticons® in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. |
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"The thing that I would emphasize is the trust that it gave us, to be doing work in a small room and just knowing that it's going to translate to a big theatre, because we were doing all this temp mixing in our small room on HD-1s and then taking it to a big stage to screen the movie. We had total faith in the translation."
- Ethan Van Der Ryn |
Few movies this year will be as high profile as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Once again, Decepticon and Autobot Transformers are brought to life to do battle on the big screen. Filmmakers know that it is the sound, with all the organic and mechanical sound effects that breathes life into the created CGI characters that are as much the stars in this franchise as their human counterparts.
Creating a soundtrack for a two-hour-plus action film is both challenging and fun, with prerequisites of talent, technical skills and hard work. The talent behind the scenes are the supervising sound editors / sound designers Ethan Van Der Ryn and Erik Aadahl, back again for this sequel, and veterans of scores of high profile feature films.
Aadahl comments on 'keeping the sound elegant,' "We learned from the first Transformers that it can be real challenging to keep things contained, especially when you have bombastic music, huge action, more explosions than any director ever attempts to put into a movie. We sort of thought of it as like a symphony, with a beginning, middle, and end, with peaks and valleys. There needed to be a shape to it that was engaging and enjoyable but never overwhelming. We don't want to blow speakers, but more importantly, we don't want to blow ears."
Van Der Ryn adds, "It steps out from where we left off with the last Transformers. Because there are some returning characters whose sonic signatures had been set on the first one, it meant that we were set with their palette, but then there is a whole lot of entirely new characters, new robots, which needed entirely new sound design."
Both sound designers have their edit rooms on the historic Sony-Columbia studio lot in Culver City, and Aadahl details their systems, "Both Ethan and I are using HD-1s, 5.1 configurations with UMS-1P subwoofers. All of the design for this movie was done on these setups."
Van Der Ryn describes their edit room workflow on temp mixes, "With Monsters vs. Aliens, we actually ended up temp mixing the whole movie in our rooms on the Meyer HD-1s and we did the same thing on Transformers. We took it to a big stage for the initial temp mix and then we moved the stems over and kept it rolling for the next three or four months."
"The thing that I would emphasize is the trust that it gave us, to be doing work in a small room and just knowing that it's going to translate to a big theatre, because we were doing all this temp mixing in our small room on HD-1s and then taking it to a big stage to screen the movie. We had total faith in the translation."
On favorite scenes, Van Der Ryn laughingly explained, "This movie is a candy store chock full of really fun scenes. Just off the top of my head, I can think of six or seven favorite scenes. There's one character that comes together from all these little bits, like ball bearings. Erik brought in these special magnets that he bought online at an educational supply place. We discovered that by throwing them up in the air, very close together, just ½" apart, you can get this weird, almost vocal-ish sound as they joined together, and that became one of the signature sounds for the Reedman sequences. It's just so cool, we were able to carve the music out of most of the sequence and it just plays very clean and spooky, it has very unique sound—I haven't heard anything like that before."
For a unique new sound for a new character, Aadahl describes how they brought a performance aspect to sound design, "There's one thing that we stumbled on, that was fun. For the main villain in the title, The Fallen, we were playing with a Theremin, and everyone knows that cheesy sci-fi sound that they make. On a brainstorm, we used the Theremin as an input device—as a signal generator for pitch and volume but then using that to trigger design chain plug-ins. So we had a very natural performance of us moving our hands three-dimensionally around the Theremin in real time to manipulate pitch and volume, to create a really synthetic electronic sound. We made a huge library of really weird twisted different sounds using this technique. Some of it is totally conceptual and atmospheric, some of it sounded a lot like vocals, big monster-like vocalizations, some of it sounded like science fiction kind of motors, bending up and down, and turning and modulating. This was one kind of fun tool that we used on this film that definitely had a different quality and sound to it."
Asked if using high-quality sound design monitoring saved time or made the process more efficient, Aadahl quickly answered, "Absolutely, it was a big time saver for us. It meant that we didn't need to spend millions on the big stages doing the same kind of work, so it was a money saver as well. But the big thing is the aesthetics, being able to have such clarity and resolution, and trust in our monitoring is so important. We could make a track that we knew would translate.
"At one point in the process, we moved one of the HD-1 setups to the Picture Department at Bay Films and set up a room, just so we could show Michael [Bay] where we were with certain scenes. That saved us quite a bit too, not just in terms of Bay's confidence with certain scenes but also time."
By Steve Shurtz
July, 2009
