Category: Film

Kyma gives voice to Tarantino’s “Hateful Eight” Blizzard


Audio engineer Jennifer Walden provides a fascinating analysis of the sound design in Quentin Tarantino’s Hateful Eight in a recent issue of Randi Altman’s postPerspective.

Tarantino is “truly an aural enthusiast and very much a sculptor of his cinema through the use of sound and music,” according to his longtime supervising sound editor, Wylie Stateman, who continues,

Sound is a major contributor to Quentin’s films and often the secret sauce that makes the meal just gel and come together as a coherent recognizable work…

Wylie Stateman, Supervising Sound Editor on Hateful Eight

 

Audio is very different from the other filmmaking aspects… Audio is very mysterious — a force that is just truly present in the moment. It’s just a vibration in the room. It’s something that the audience experiences but can’t see and can’t touch. It’s a different kind of art form, and as an audio artist I love working for Quentin because he is so particular and he values the contribution that sound makes to the experience of watching his film.

Sylvain Lasseur created & performed the voice of the blizzard

Tarantino is fascinated with the sounds of the actors’ voices and he wanted the ninth adversary in the film, the blizzard, to have its own character and its own unique ‘voice’. For that challenge, Stateman and co-supervising sound editor Harry Cohen called in sound designer Sylvain Lasseur. Sylvain brought in his Continuum fingerboard and Kyma / Pacarana system and set to work creating the voice of the blizzard.

Using Kyma and the Continuum, Lasseur was able to perform multiple layers of wind sounds to picture. They built the blizzard literally one gust, one whistle and one whisp at a time, designing the wind to complement the dialog and the picture editing in a unique way. According to Stateman, using Kyma, Lasseur was able to create an “instrument” on which he could perform the voice of the blizzard.

The first step was to create a guide track based around the dialog; then they modeled other sounds around that guide track. Stateman describes how they composed the sound design in an almost musical way:

So let’s say we have a base sound of a blizzard, we could then, very selectively, model wind wisps or rumbles or anything else against it. The Kyma would shape the other samples in time relative to the control track. Once we have them all modeled against each other we can start to pull them apart a little bit so that each element can have its own dynamic moment. It becomes more like a parade and you hear the low, the mid and the high — not on top of each other but offset from each other. The artistry comes in turning samples into instruments.

The importance of sound to Tarantino is evident in the fact that Lasseur ended up spending four months creating the instruments in Kyma and another four months performing and shaping the voice of the blizzard around the dialog and visuals.

For more insights on the sound for Hateful Eight, check out Jennifer Walden’s full article: Wyle Stateman Talks Sound Editing on ‘The Hateful Eight’

A little night music

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A Little Night Music is an evening of Visualized Music—films composed to music (rather than music composed for films) featuring videos by Roxanne Rea in collaboration with composers Bill Rea, Debra Kaye, and the owner of Kyma system serial number 1: Dick Robinson!

Sycamore Place Gallery

120 Sycamore Place
Decatur GA 30030

October 10, 2015
at 8:30 p.m.

Suggested Donation $15

Kyma transforms Lucy

A few months ago, sound designer Gurwal Coïc-Gallas got a call from sound superviser Guillaume Bouchateau asking him to join the team for Luc Besson’s latest project, Lucy. Gurwal was tasked with creating sound design libraries that the editors could draw upon when creating the special effects. In particular, Gurwal was asked to focus on:
  • Organic cellular movement (when Scarlet Johansson’s body is transforming)
  • Electromagnetic fields (because she can see electromagnetic fields) and
  • Voice effects (on her thoughts)
Gurwal used Kyma cross-synthesis on all the sounds and is enthusiastic about the results: “The movie is great, huge, surprising, probably one of Besson’s best, and the soundtrack is amazing!”

Roland Kuit in Stockholm, New York, Edinburgh

Composer/researcher/sound designer Roland Kuit is currently composer-in-residence at the EMS in Stockholm working on a project that combines their Buchla 400 with Kuit’s Kyma/Pacarana system.

He is also at work creating new pieces for Pacarana and Chicago based composer/conductor Renee Baker‘s Chicago Symfonietta to be premiered in New York this fall, and you can hear him lecture on modular sound design for TV and games the Napier University in Edinburgh in February 2015.  Check out his full calendar here.

Kyma Spectum Editor in Tesseract Portal Device

Sound designer François Blaignan had an opportunity to apply Kyma in an unusual way in his work on the interactive multimedia exhibition Marvel’s Avengers STATION (Science Training and Tactical Intelligence Operative Network) now on display in Time Square in NYC and featured in this month’s Mix magazine. The 10,000-square-foot installation is a space where Avengers fans can immerse themselves in characters and artifacts associated with the Avengers.

 For the Tesseract Portal Device, the installation designers were having a hard time matching the look of the spectrograms of X-rays, infrared, and gamma rays provided to them by NASA.  So Blaignan created an animation using stills from Kyma’s spectrum editor and synched it to the Tessaract sound from the movie for a perfect match.

Kyma wasn’t a totally silent partner on the project; it also played a role in creating the sounds of the particle accelerator in Banner’s lab.

National Illusion

Javier Umpierrez has just finished the sound design and music for a trailer for Ilusión Nacional, Olallo Rubio‘s upcoming documentary on the history of Mexico’s national soccer team, that conveys the passion and the politics behind the world’s most popular sport.

In the trailer, Umpierrez used Kyma to create and control the vast, powerful crowd sounds as well as other sound design elements. Starting with a recording he made of a full-capacity crowd in Aztec Stadium, he’s been utilizing Kyma’s SampleCloud and controlling pitch and amplitude in real time using Kyma Control on the iPad.

Umpierrez is also doing the score and the sound design for the film itself, so we can look forward to even more awesome crowd effects and inspiring music when the film opens in April 2014.

Petits Personnages

Sound designer Gurwal COÏC-GALLAS was asked to create a language for the little creatures that appear in the newest version of The Beauty and the Beast directed by Christophe Gans. Gurwal used Kyma to create their charming bird-like language (here’s a brief example):

Take your favorite child (whether or not her name is Belle) to see the premiere of The Beauty and the Beast (played, respectively, by Léa Seydoux and Vincent Cassel) on 12 February 2014. You can see what the creatures (called Tadums) look like in the trailer:

John Balcom Scores Big Shot

Composer John Balcom recently completed the score for a new documentary utilizing Kyma as his synthesis tool kit.  BIG SHOT, part of ESPN’s award-winning series 30 FOR 30, tells the story of John Spano’s notorious purchase of the New York Islanders hockey team – which, 4 months after it happened, was exposed as one of the biggest scams in sports history. Directed by Kevin Connolly (E from ENTOURAGE), the film offers the first ever interview with Spano. It’s a pretty incredible story — Newsday called it “a must-watch for anyone with an interest in the power of delusion — both of the self and of others.” The film will be premiering Oct 22nd at 8pm EST on ESPN, and will eventually be available on demand as well as Netflix.

Far more than a sports documentary, the film is, at its core, the story of how a con man pulled off an incredible scam, and much of Balcom’s music speaks to this part of the film. The main instruments used were harp, piano, percussion, and synth, with Kyma supplying most of the synth parts.

When asked why he uses Kyma, Balcom responds, “I find the sound quality second to none. It has become an invaluable tool for me and I find myself using it more and more in my projects.”

A script shaped more by sound than words

“Working from a script shaped more by sound than words, insight comes at us in primal waves. The heart-wrenching sobs, the gut-churning nausea, the keening and, perhaps most profound of all, the silence. It all carries specific meaning.”

This is how Betsy Sharkey, film critic LA Times, describes Hamilton Sterling‘s sound for Morning, a film by Leland Orser with his wife Jeanne Tripplehorn, Laura Linney, Elliot Gould, Kyle Chandler, and Jason Ritter.

Sterling, who is credited as sound designer/re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor on the film, used Kyma to process the transitions to the characters’ memory flashbacks of their child in this tough and unsentimental exploration of a couple’s grief over the loss of their child.

The film opened in LA, New York, and select cities this month and will be available through VOD and DVD for those of us who do not live in “select cities”.

Peter’s People: Creating the Dream

The little village of Petersburgh, NY, nestled in the hills and mountains of eastern Rensselaer County, New York, has long been known for the rugged beauty of its landscape.  What is less well known is that this setting has, over the years, attracted a unique mix of independent artists and visionaries, individuals who have had a lifelong dream and realized it.  From disciplines as diverse as music, painting, master masonry, sculpture, jewelry and metal sculpture, ceramic pottery and more, artists are thriving in this small village.

Peter’s People — Creating the Dream by musician/video artists Barton and Priscilla McLean, is the story of eight such artists and musicians living and working in Petersburgh.

Barton McLean’s score for the film, based on musical materials from the artist/musicians featured in the video, was produced entirely in Kyma using the Timeline. McLean pioneered the Synthi 100 and Fairlight CMI in the United States, and has subsequently gone through numerous studio incarnations centered on the Moog, Arp, EU, Serge, and now, Kyma. The husband and wife composing duo have produced CDs on the labels EM-Japan, Folkways, CRI, Centaur, Lousiville Orchestra, Orion, Opus 1, Advance, Parma/Naxos, and Innova.

International touring and media artists in their own right, the McLeans chose in this film to focus not on their own work, but on the many other talented and successful creative dreamers they found, including a world class bagpiper who founded a school in Petersburgh, a master award-winning stone mason whose unique stone work has graced buildings and landscapes from Atlanta to the Adirondacks, a watercolor artist who appeared in “Oprah” magazine and has published a definitive book on watercoloring, and several others.