ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
 Photo by Frank Morrone, MPSE |
Crafting Gotham City’s Soundscape
MPSE looks at The Dark Knight
By Michael Kunkes
In late October, the Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE) Sound Show returned to the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, teaming once again with the American Cinematheque to present an inside, highly entertaining look at the complex process behind the soundscape of this year’s major blockbuster, The Dark Knight. The yearly event’s first sold-out crowd was treated to a widescreen demonstration by the film’s supervising sound editor and sound designer Richard King, MPSE (2004 Oscar winner for Master and Commander); music editor Alex Gibson, MPSE (The Prestige, John Adams) and composer Hans Zimmer (1995 Oscar winner for The Lion King), supported by a custom theatre sound system from Meyer Sound Labs of Berkeley, California.
The genesis of TDK’s sound effects was traced by King first to April 2007, when he began supplying preliminary material to picture editor Lee Smith, A.C.E., then to the latter part of the year when work began in earnest––beginning with the bank robbery prologue, the IMAX opening sequence that was used as the film’s primary marketing tool. From the start, King said, TDK was a major adventure in recording. “I worked with a very small crew of people—mixers, recordists, sound editors—that I’d worked with for years. That way, we could all stay on the show for a long time and become much more invested in the project.”
 Sound editor/designer Richard King. Photo by Frank Morrone, MPSE |
King began the demo portion of the evening by showing a short film of he and his crew capturing automotive sounds that would ultimately be used for the Joker’s semi-truck and the Batpod vehicle. “For me, the purpose of sound design is to give an emotional component for inanimate objects,” King explained. “We wanted the Joker’s truck to be like a dragon with its own ferocious sound, so we took the muffler off a semi, remade the exhaust pipe out of ducting, mounted it where the muffler was and then my sound recordists––Jon Fasal and Eric Potter, both of whom I’ve worked with for 15 years––mic’d the exhaust, the suspension, the tandem part of the truck, the intakes, the engine and the interior of the cab. We also mic'd an armored car, and each vehicle had 12-14 different channels recording different components of the vehicle.”
The sheer volume of mayhem and destruction in TDK necessitated a lot of firearm recording, as seen in another onscreen demonstration. “With weapons especially, the more mics, the better, because different mics and varying proximities pick up different frequencies. There are so many variables, and we tried to cover everything,” King said. “We didn’t make any attempt to be true to the actual sounds of the weapons we used. We went to an armorer, selected over a dozen automatic weapons, rifles and pistols, and set up at the Burbank Police training range. We taped mics to the guns to get the mechanics and firing sounds, placing them at intervals downrange to get scale and scope. When all these sounds are input into ProTools and lined up, compensating for the sound delay, you get an entirely new sound which no individual mic or listener could hear because of all these combinations of distances and perspective. “
In addition to what King called “these more prosaic sounds of reality,” the sound effects crew needed to create the Batpod’s whiny electric sounds entirely from scratch. The crew began experimenting with big electric motors, and found the perfect power coefficient in the Wrightspeed X1 and Tesla Roadster electric performance cars. “We placed mics all over the motor––the differential, the transmission and on the hubs,” he continued. “We also recorded truck tires that we placed on my assistant Andrew’s wife’s Suburban.” Another happy accident was a key element to putting together the sound for the Batpod. “I was on my treadmill and dragged the edge of my running shoe over the back of the machine, and that provided a great sound that we added to the mix. We also did a lot of pitch shifting and modeling with the Tesla sounds to match the maneuvers that the Batpod is actually making in the film.”
According to King, director Christopher Nolan’s vision for TDK included heavy use of production dialogue, and in a pair of sequence breakdowns, he demonstrated the sheer power of the sound editor’s art. The first was a portion of the prologue bank robbery sequence in which the bank manager fires wildly at the Joker and an accomplice. The sequence was deconstructed to show the manager’s preserved production dialogue, loop lines of the clowns with added reverb, Foley, body and bullet hits, weapon,; and the final mix with dialogue, sound effects and music.
The other sequence King deconstructed was the truck-and-Batpod chase through the streets of Gotham City, one of the denser tracks in the film, utilizing much of the sound from the earlier truck and electric performance car recordings. Again, King projected the scene with various effects stems––weapons, bullet hits and ricochets, and an “add stem”––a catch-all pass with a potpourri of widely contributed ideas (even animal roars), followed by a portion of a film print with the finished mix. “Chris wanted the film to be very gritty; more like an urban crime drama than a superhero film,” King explained. “The production sound was very noisy in spots due to the exterior locations [and the noisy IMAX camera], but he embraced that and wanted that to be part of the film aesthetically. Believe it or not, all the dialogue from the first production track was salvaged; it was just cut very mod-to-mod. There were perhaps a half-dozen loop lines in the entire film; everything else is production. The only sequence with any real looping is the clowns in the bank robbery prologue.”
 Composer Hans Zimmer, left, and music editor Alex Gibson. Photo by Frank Morrone, MPSE |
According to Zimmer, whose 100-plus film scores include Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and Pirates of the Caribbean, one of the primary mnemonics of TDK would be the cello-based Joker theme. “Chris allowed me to work in great privacy and be as provocative as I wanted to be with the music,” Zimmer revealed. “I would not have take into account any worries about sequels or blockbusters or play it safe in any way. The first time Chris ever heard anything was a day before the dub of the prologue, which the picture editors had cut to a completely different piece of music and tempo. I played Chris about 8000 bars of pretty crazy and uncompromising ideas, and I knew I had him with this material. Being a reckless sort of character, I was glad I had Alex to hold the baby for me and sort it all out.”
Gibson recalled that he and the sound crew went onto the dub stage the next day, with all these bits and pieces, in a spirit of anarchy and a bit of uncertainty. “Chris really liked Hans’ Batman Begins score and wanted continuity, but he also needed all these new character themes with completely different tempos and feels,” he said. “We had Hans’ great new Joker theme, but the problem was that while that theme was great for mid-level action or slower scenes, it was dragging us down in the bigger action scenes because it wasn’t fast enough.
“In one early experiment [which was screened], we had a scene that cut back and forth between Harvey Dent at the hospital and Bruce Wayne driving in his Lamborghini,” Gibson continued. “Fortunately, I had access to the full Batman Begins score and all the splits––high strings, percussion, and brass—and I was able to play around with that, introduce Joker elements and come up with a lot of little grooves. With 18 hours from the time Hans gave me his mix until the dub, I cheated a lot, stretching brass notes as long or making them as short as I needed, doing anything I could do to let Chris know that this would all work, even though it seemed early on like a lot of tracks thrown arbitrarily onto the screen.”
“Chris encouraged us to experiment with unusual ways of working,” added Zimmer. “I would give Alex large chunks of ‘fresh meat’ not saying a lot about it, and he would very creatively put it all together and figure out how it all worked. It was a very unusual way to work, and a lot of our sounds crossed over into Richard’s territory and vice versa. Long before I came up with the Joker theme, I asked Richard if he had any sounds of ‘screaming’ metal. Well, the very next day I had hours of screaming metal and I quickly realized that was not what I was looking for. It was that kind of thing that always made me feel we were a team.”
“There was a quiet intensity about the whole process on The Dark Knight,” King concluded. “It was hard to go into this crazy, dangerous uncharted territory and work in this very anarchistic way, but it made for a better movie. We went up a lot of blind alleys and made mistakes, but we ultimately came up with something great. It was the best kind of collaboration.”
Michael Kunkes is a freelance editor and writer specializing in animation, production and post-production. He can be reached at writermk@sbcglobal.net.