Randy Thom talks supplementing sight with sound

O, brave new world that has such people in it — such people as Hollywood sound-designer Randy Thom. He sees the film industry as changing in response to new technology and theories of sound. Specifically, sound design is a field in which traditional notions of sound as merely “icing on the cake” are being replaced by the reverse — movies designed specifically for sound.

Thom’s revolutionary approach to sound design, in which sounds are the basis for a script and the visuals are layered in afterward, is easier to apply to animated films than to live-action movies. According to Thom, today’s animated films desperately need sound to be designed properly so they are distinct from traditional cartoons. Typically, animated films produced by studios such as Pixar and DreamWorks begin as radio plays with illustrated storyboards, optimizing the more realistic sonic texture of 21st-century sound technology.

Thom, the director of sound design at Bay Area-based Skywalker Sound, has won two Academy Awards for sound design and has worked on films such as “The Incredibles,” Episodes V and VI of the “Star Wars” films, “War of the Worlds,” two “Harry Potter” movies and “Forrest Gump,” to name a few. He described the “brave new world” of sound design as one that craves “visual mystery,” darkness and fog in order to thrive in film. Because one’s visual sense dominates the auditory sense, it becomes the sound designer’s task to challenge this biological predisposition.

“Starving the eye for information” makes the audience employ the ear, Thom explained. He stood at ease before a crowd seated at the Pacific Film Archive Theater on Nov. 21 as a part of the UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive’s ongoing series “Behind the Scenes: The Art and Craft of Cinema.” In addition to his lecture before Thursday’s “Wild at Heart,” Thom introduced the films “Colors” and “The Incredibles” over the weekend. The series intends to lift the superficial curtain over Hollywood films, exposing audiences to important figures working in relative anonymity whose roles are essential to every film. Directors and actors parade their names across the opening credits, while critical background figures such as sound designers go unnoticed. Thom sipped from a glass of water and continued his speech in his crisp, finely tuned radio voice. For Thom, sound design is more an art, less a science.

“Sound is too often pigeonholed as a technical thing,” he explained. “In reality, very few of us are sound engineers.” Thom emphasizes the difference between the job of a sound designer and that of an audio engineer, explaining that the sound designer must work creatively to develop and employ sounds at the right moments in good taste. Thom criticizes the live-action directors in Hollywood who demand little more from their sound designers than the typical string of booming explosion noises designed to shake theaters.

Evidently, doing what is typical does not win an Oscar. For Thom, a conscientious practitioner of sound aesthetics avoids doing the obvious. Instead, he advocates manipulating sound so it takes a point-of-view approach, allowing for subjectivity so that through unique applications and distortions of noise, audiences are drawn inside a character’s mind, dreams and hallucinations, hearing the world through the character’s ears.

The example Thom uses to explicate this approach is the opening scene of “Apocalypse Now,” the first film he worked on as a sound designer. A tropical vision of palm trees spills onto the screen behind Thom’s head while the track “The End” by the Doors melds with distorted, synth-like helicopter sounds that fluctuate in pace and frequency. For Thom, who received no formal training, the set was his film school, as he acquired his keen ear through professional experience.

At the end of his speech, Thom redirected audience attention away from himself and toward the cinema screen. He abruptly slipped back into the shadows and out of the auditorium, instilling silence for the screening of one of his projects — for the screams and bone-cracking brutality that compose the opening scene of David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart.”

Contact Kate Irwin at [email protected]