Surround 2000: Multichannel Sound For Film

While the focus of the first annual Surround 2000 conference seemed to be on the widely anticipated transition from 2 to 5.1-channels of audio for the music recording industry, with the forthcoming DVD-Audio format, there was also a series of three seminars on film sound production. Although the use of multichannel sound for movies is obviously nothing new, these seminars were nonetheless informative, allowing attendees to hear firsthand some of the creative approaches to recording, mixing, and monitoring sound in multiple channels from noted professionals in the business.The first seminar was devoted to new and innovative approaches to acquisition of sound effects. Conventionally, the way to record live sounds, in building a library of effects for film sound, is to capture them in mono or stereo. Wylie Stateman, Supervising Sound Editor at Soundelux, and Patricio Libenson, a sound effects recordist, described and demonstrated a series of strategies for acquiring sounds in multiple channels.The second seminar was conducted by Tomlinson Holman, who described the processes in building a film soundtrack. The example was a scene from ""Jurassic Park,"" with the T-Rex. Elementary sound effects were combined into a premix, to which several other premixes were added, along with dialogue and sweeteners, to obtain the final mix. The seminar also featured a student film presentation from Stuart Sperling at the USC School of Film and Television, which demonstrated the creative potential of multichannel sound.The final seminar focused on issues related to scoring for films. Alan Howarth, score composer and sound designer/sound effects specialist, noted the importance of taking into account phantom images between speakers, as well as the use of full-range loudspeakers when monitoring in a studio environment. Bruce Botnick, well-respected music-scoring mixer, explained that he tries to avoid the .1 LFE channel for music as much as possible, and his concerns with having the appropriate ambience of music for a particular scene in a film.