Old Dogs Teaching New Tricks

Tuesday, Walaka hosannahed before the teaching gods for a job well-done. It inspired me to blow the dust off a theme of a similar sort that I wrote back when I was teaching, because I wanted to remember that day and what it felt like.


I’ve been a Sound Designer since 1980 and I love what I do. To me, there is no greater "high" than taking an audio track and by inserting a selected sound, make it appear that the sound had every right being there in the first place. To fool an audience into thinking that that sound belonged there and had, in fact, always been there. It’s a heady trick to play on people’s minds, and it can be used to influence and also manipulate the audience into an emotional response.

God help me, I do love it so.

So, I’ve had a few months of slow work, and I began teaching at Shoreline Community College. I had two “Beginning Sound Design” classes fold out from under me, due to “lack of interest” – in other words, only a few students signed up. Now, in the Spring of 2005, I’m co-teaching a class of Audio Post-Production that had so many students it required two sections. I’m teaching the Tuesday-Thursday section, but also hanging around for the Monday-Wednesday sessions to see how people are progressing.

The class assignment is simple: do all the required audio work to finish a movie in time to show it to the public June 8th. And not just one movie. Two movies. One is “The Great Escape,” the Hollywood-ized version of the audacious POW camp escape during World War II. You probably remember it for Steve McQueen and his leaping motorcycle. There are no women in this film, so to make sure the female students get some voices to impersonate (and to give the class a film to have fun with) the other film is TGE’s claymation progenitor, “Chicken Run.” Two more apt films for a class just about to graduate from an audio post-production sequence could not be found. And the students have thrown themselves at these two films with an enthusiasm that is thrilling.

For the past five weeks, the students have been dealing with ADR (Automated Dialog Replacement). We’ve stripped the audio from the two films, and the students have had to present a fully-typed out script and re-record the lines made famous by Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Garner, Donald Pleasance, et al. It has been exhausting work, and I’ve been watching nerves fray, and tired lines etch into people’s faces. Frankly, it’s made me worried.

The next phase of the project is foley, the peculiar artistry in motion pictures of recreating the sounds of people walking, fiddling with props and generally making the film’s world sound more real than it actually can be by being recorded with a simple microphone. This skill bears the name of a legendary practitioner of the art at Universal Studios (Jack Foley). I’ve had students approach me in the halls and say they’ll not get through all the foley work, but still they’ve plunged in, asking for donations of boots and building small stages of dirt, and wood to faux-walk on.

Friday I went up to campus to donate my brother’s Vietnam-vintage Army boots for the cause.

I’ve recently been reflecting on how teaching can’t possibly provide the thrill that doing my own sound design brings me. Emily Dickinson once wrote that she knew her poetry was good when it felt like her head might explode. I have known what that feels like doing sound design. But I doubted that teaching those skills would make me feel as good. Mind you, there have been joys: the original music the students have composed for “Chicken Run” is both fun and functional…and wholly their own. The Music Team for “The Great Escape” is working with a concurrent MIDI class to recreate Elmer Bernstein’s classic score. The first primitive MIDI sounds were primitive. Now, the team is working with an initially reluctant MIDI class to beef up their charts with better orchestral samples, the results of which have been magical for the music and enervating for the MIDI class, to the thrill of all concerned. And some of the performances improve on the originals, inspiring admiring smiles, a shake of the head in wonder, and barks of appreciative laughter.

I entered Studio “D” in the basement of the Music Building with my brother’s boots. Students John Nold and Tim Sage looked at me with eyes as wide as childrens’ on Christmas morning. “You gotta listen to this!” John said. “We’ve got the first four minutes of footsteps.” “Okay. Who’s in the booth?” “David.” They played the sequence of the prisoners first arriving at their camp, disembarking from the transport trucks and fanning out. And I got to watch David Villablanca, by himself, portray the various German soldiers, and the shuffling of some 250 Allied prisoners recorded over 4 tracks maximum. It worked like gangbusters, sounding as if it was always meant to be there. It was amazing work.

I felt like my brain would explode.