Designing Sound

Jul 06 2009

Gary Rydstrom Special: Jurassic Park

Let’s begin the Gary Rydstrom Special with Jurassic Park, an Academy Award-winning movie directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1993 marking the debut of DTS in motion picture theatres on 876 screens.

There is an article at MPSE taken from a special event called “Big Movie Sound Effects: Behind the Scenes and Out of the Speakers” presented in Hollywood by Dane A. Davis and Gary Rydstrom, who spoke about the Sound Design of Jurassic Park.

“Sound effects, to me, are not just to make the unbelievable believable, or to make sounds that make the movie realistic. They’re really there for the sake of storytelling. And one of the key things I try to keep in mind when doing sound effects work is how can we use sound effects to help tell a story. For a dinosaur movie — for “Jurassic Park” — it’s going to give us a sense of fear, a sense of who these dinosaurs are, it’s going to tell us things that are happening off screen, it’s going to give us a sense of scale. It doesn’t really, to my mind, because I’m a sound effects guy, it doesn’t play all that well without sound effects. So I will demonstrate this… Steven Spielberg is not in the audience, right? So I’m going to play a clip from “Jurassic Park” with just dialogue. And we’ll get a sense of how that works.”

“It’s very important, I think, to plan ahead for sound. One of the things that good directors like Steven Spielberg do is they think about sound early on. One of the important aspects of the T Rex attack scene which I’ll show you on film at the end is that they decided to play it with no music. Which is great! It puts you there. It made it feel not like a movie but like real life. It became scarier. He planned to introduce the T Rex with the sound before you saw it, by hearing it off in the distance before you see it. His use of sound is great, I can’t take much credit for some of these great ideas which really come from the director.”

Read full article here.

Jurassic Park (1993) – Official Trailer