The sound of magic

THE PHRASE ‘the magic of the movies’ is over-used but it is one that has stuck with the medium from the earliest days of special effects right up to today’s computerised graphics and ear-bashing surround sound. Magic has also been a common subject for films, with just about every conceivable magician, conjurer, sorcerer and wizard—from Houdini to Merlin—being portrayed on the silver screen.

This month, arguably the youngest practitioner of the mystic arts joins these luminaries. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is one of the two most keenly awaited films of this year. The second is The Lord of the Rings, also an adaptation of a much-loved book, albeit a longer established and more literary work, that is due for release not long after the adventures of the apprentice wizard begin.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (known as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the US) was the first novel to be published by British author JK Rowling, who has gone on to great acclaim, success and fortune. Just like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, undoubtedly a precedent if not a direct influence, the Harry Potter books have proved popular with children and adults alike as they are about what happens when ‘ordinary’ children escape the adult-dominated world into a realm where they have practical and mystical powers.

Directed by Spielberg alumnus Chris Columbus, whose credits include Home Alone, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone stars Daniel Radcliffe as the young magician. The youngster is neglected by his aunt and uncle, played by two actors adept at grotesques, Fiona Shaw and Richard Griffiths, but he breaks out of that world when he enrols at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. This institution is overseen by Richard Harris as the headmaster; others involved include Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman and Robbie Coltrane as the groundskeeper.

Hogwarts has been created at Leavesden Studios, 20 miles outside London. This extensive set has not yet been struck as, even before the first movie is released, the second in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, is due to go into production next year. Other locations have included Gloucester Castle and various university colleges around Oxford.

The sound of magic is something that must have concerned many over the years, JK Rowling among them. It certainly has concerned Eddy Joseph since the end of last year, when he was engaged as supervising sound editor on this film. Joseph, whose previous credits include the very different and deeply impressive Enemy at the Gates, began work on Harry Potter on 19th February this year.

A now common situation faced by audio postproduction crews in the movie business is that even at the late stage they become involved in the proceedings, not all the visuals will have been completed. Indeed, at the time of this interview with Joseph, one of the key sequences, the Quidditch game, had not been finished. As the creation of the sounds relies partly on what is being seen, this means that a great deal of the film could not be locked off until a time worryingly near the release date.

This organic way of working was evidently something Chris Columbus wanted to achieve but it still proved vague in terms of explaining exactly what the film should sound like. Joseph says that during his first discussion with the director, Columbus said he did not want to use anything that sounded modern, futuristic or electronic. After this briefing, Joseph and sound effects editor Martin Cantwell spent a lot of time ‘playing around’ with various wind and animal noises. Cantwell also went to Penshurst Castle in Kent to record, among other things, creaking doors.

Like other sound designers working today, Joseph makes efforts to avoid using the generally available sound effects libraries. This is partly not to duplicate what others have done—Joseph says this is more important within the industry as other sound editors will recognise specific tracks, something that the average movie-goer is unlikely to do—and partly because, on this project, many of the tracks that were used did not exist in any library.

Joseph admits that some elements may be used from commercially produced collections but, in the main, he and Cantwell tend to record original sounds. ‘Martin is always taping stuff when he hears a good sound, so that he can add it to his own library,’ says Joseph, who adds that the two of them spent a lot of time thinking about what the various great halls and other spaces featured in the film should sound like.

Audio post began with the team centred around just Joseph and his assistant laying down the various effects and dialogue tracks. When an early cut of the film had been assembled for viewing by Warner Brothers’ president of world-wide theatrical production, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Joseph put together to go with it what he describes as the best soundtrack he could offer at that time. ‘The director and picture editor wanted to present what had already been done in the best possible shape,’ he explains. ‘I always mix down from 24-track to 2-track for the cutting copy but temps are getting more extravagant these days.’

Joseph decided that the only way to give Di Bonaventura a good idea of what the finished movie would sound like was to produce a sample track and lock it up to the picture. This, he says, worked so well that it was decided to keep that and use it as a reference throughout the rest of the production. ‘The sound design evolved from that,’ Joseph observes.

Even so, for some of the sequences Joseph and Cantwell were still working purely to the script and whatever comments were coming from the production team. The Quidditch game is a prominent example of sound effects being created to fit with visuals that did not at the time exist. Quidditch is a game of ‘super hockey’ that is played in the air by 14 children on broomsticks.

Instead of one ball, as in the conventional ground-based game, this aerial, mystical version of hockey involves three balls, each of which had to have an individual sound. The Quaffle is a red ball that is passed around the field and is used to score goals. There are two Bludgers, small black balls that are designed to be hit towards opposing players with the intention of knocking them from their brooms. Then there is the Snitch, a golden ball the size of a walnut that flies around at high speed; when this is caught, the game is over.

Joseph and Cantwell decided that as the Bludgers are nasty, independent balls, they should sound like angry animals. In contrast, the Snitch has an elegant, humming bird-like sound. ‘We didn’t get any of that from the visuals,’ Joseph says, ‘it had to come from the script and the book and our imaginations. When I first heard I might be involved in this project, I read the book and enjoyed it. It also gave me some ideas about what things should sound like.’

The number of Harry Potter related web sites and the amount of interest the books and now this film has generated shows that people are willing to believe in Rowling’s fantasy world. As he sees it, Joseph’s task was to ensure the audience continues to believe when they finally see the movie. ‘Everything has to be real,’ he says. ‘Hogwarts, for example, could not be seen to have electricity, so everything is lit by candles, which have a sound of their own.” Prime amongst these are the flambeaus, which activate when someone walks past.

Among the other elements that sound had to make as real as possible for the audience are a troll and a three-headed dog called Fluffy. Despite the best of efforts, Joseph realistically knows that there will be some fans who will be disappointed with the way some things sound and look. ‘Everybody who read the book has an idea of what the characters and places look and sound like,’ he says, ‘and we and the visual effects people won’t be able to satisfy them all.’

Track-laying began at Leavesden Studios, where the sound effects and editing audio crew were working alongside the location personnel and cast. Production sound was recorded on DAT by John Midgely; while Eddy Joseph says some of the shots made it difficult to get the best possible ‘live’ sound, he says most of what was recorded was usable. ‘We have used a lot of what was shot,’ he says, ‘partly because it was good and partly because, when you work with child actors, it’s best to do a few takes on location. If you try to emulate it in ADR, it doesn’t work as well, especially if you’re redoing a performance that was pretty much made up on the spot.’

Joseph and his team moved to Shepperton Studios towards the end of the summer. In addition to Joseph and Martin Cantwell, Colin Richie edited the dialogue, Nick Lowe handled ADR and Peter Holt took care of Foley. It is common today for movie audio post to be split between two or more makes of digital audio workstation; the dichotomy is usually one for effects and one for dialogue
and ADR.

The split on Harry Potter is not quite so obvious. Around half the effects were edited on two DAR SoundStation STORMs; the other half was laid to Avid Audio Vision running in Pro Tools mode. All production dialogue was edited on Audio Vision, with the effects and ADR being cut on the STORMs, which worked in conjunction with ‘a couple’ of DAR OMR8s. The decision to use DAR for ADR was, according to Joseph, a logical one as Nick Lowe owns a STORM. The Foley was put together on Akai DD8.

As Joseph points out, using the machines found in most studios makes file transfer easier but with the advances made in this field recently, it is not as difficult as it once was to pass material between different devices. The OMR8s were chiefly used for file transfer, with tracks on Avid or Pro Tools being passed through these to the STORMs and back again. ‘It took a bit of working out because no-one has been doing this kind of thing,’ says Joseph, ‘but I think it will be something that will be done in the future. There are limitations with anything but there is also the chance to discover that you can do things you didn’t know were possible on a certain machine.’

A STORM and an Audio Vision were kept on the stage at Leavesden during filming, enabling ADR to be carried out on site, with instantaneous access to the various libraries being used. ‘The STORM allows you to instantly go from magneto-optical,’ explains Joseph. ‘The Audio Vision can only do that once you’ve shut the machine down and re-started it.’

Location dialogue was transferred from DAT and auto-conformed to the Audio Vision, while lines for ADR were conformed as STORM files through the OMR8. ADR is sometimes recorded long after the end of shooting, which can cause problems in terms of both getting the artist back from whatever they have moved on to and getting a performance that is as good as or better than the original. Members of the Cinema Audio Society in the US recently sent an open letter to producers and directors saying that if ADR has to be done, it should be done either on site or as soon after the initial take as is possible.

This happened on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone—only for reasons of expediency. A strike by members of the Screen Actors Guild was in the offing this summer, so all ADR was recorded by the end of June, pretty much as soon as the dialogue had been shot on location. While Joseph attempted to keep the amount of re-recording down to a minimum, there was one aspect that meant there was going to be at least some ADR.

It’s that title. In the UK the book, and consequently the film, is known as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. In the US the title was changed at the suggestion of JK Rowling’s American editor, Arthur Levine. He was concerned that the original title would give a ‘misleading’ idea of what the story was about. Levine and Rowling discussed various alternatives before the author came up with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. While this makes the work sound less esoteric, it probably gave spurious credence to the accusation by the moral majority in the US that Harry Potter promotes witchcraft.

Either way, it caused problems for the sound crew. For the two main ‘domestic’ versions (the UK and the US), every reference to the Stone had to be made twice, one referring to the Philosopher, one mentioning the Sorcerer. When the line was on screen, this called for alternative takes. As some lines were spoken by actors off-screen, these could be dealt with purely by ADR. Aside from the two main versions, the movie has also been prepared in 30 different languages, making for a total of 15,000 prints.

Joseph and his team prepared 16 tracks of dialogue, 16 tracks of ADR, around another 16 tracks of crowd noise and 16–24 tracks of Foley. There were up to 64 tracks of sound effects; Joseph says that there were more in some scenes and fewer in others. A greater number of tracks were also used on some elements to obviate the need for panning during the dubbing process to achieve surround effects. Joseph says that a 5-speaker configuration can be used to assign specific tracks to different parts of an effect, which will then move around the sound picture. Although Harry Potter is being presented in Dolby Digital EX, with six loudspeakers, it is still effectively five channels as the third surround is a matrix.

For flying sequences, Joseph explains that Tracks 1, 2 & 3 were assigned to the centre front channel, comprising the whoosh of flight on Track 1, the sound of the broomstick on Track 2 and the flap of Harry’s cloak on Track 3. With these three elements in the middle, Tracks 4, 5 & 6 are used for the right front loudspeaker, Tracks 7, 8 & 9 for right surround, Tracks 10, 11 & 12 for left surround and Tracks 13, 14 & 15 for front left. Joseph says that if this can be done in the laying up process, then there is no need to use the pan stick during dubbing. ‘It’s more work but it is a more accurate way of doing surround,’ he says.

The dub was engineered by re-recording mixer Ray Merrin in Theatre 4 at Shepperton, on a Harrison MPC desk and mastered to Akai. The music by John Williams, a specialist in lush fantasy scores, was recorded at AIR Lyndhurst. With the second Harry Potter film already announced, Eddy Joseph is not certain whether he will be working on it but can console himself with the knowledge that he has already created a good many of the sound effects that the young wizard will unleash next time round. It’s obviously a kind of magic.


Pictured: Eddy Joseph—‘it had to come from the book and our imaginations’