Through a new partnership, Sundance Institute and Skywalker Sound want to change the noisy conversation about music and sound design in film.
Each year through their longstanding Composers Labs, Sundance invites young, gifted musicians who want to work in film composition to an intensive program facilitated by industry-established advisors (read the list of this year's composers and filmmakers here). So what's different this year? Enter Skywalker Sound.
Back in June, Sundance Institute relocated their longstanding, now newly redefined Composers Labs to Skywalker Ranch, George Lucas' secluded site of filmmaking genius in Marin County, CA. Though the documentary arm of the Composers Lab wrapped up in June, Sundance hosts its lab for narrative features through July 25, under the stewardship of Sundance film music program director Peter Golub. Sundance has held annual Composers Labs for fiction films since 1999 and for documentaries since 2005. But this is the first time the Institute has engaged with sound design at all, and it is their first collaboration with Skywalker Sound.
"Skywalker Sound has been enormously generous with the independent film community," said Sundance Institute executive director Keri Putnam in a phone interview, where she spoke to me from the open splendor of the Northern California ranch. "It became apparent that the work we've been doing for many years with film composers through our program at Sundance would benefit from adding the dimension of sound design."
Among mentors hosting master classes this year in fiction film are composers Thomas Newman (Oscar winner for "American Beauty") and Mark Isham (nominated for "A River Runs Through It"). Mentors bring their past work to the table as visual case studies. Lab participants are asked to craft new music for scenes from the films of these mentors. After seminars and rounds of critiques, they're paired with Sundance resident filmmakers who give composers the chance to create music for their unfinished projects.
Typically, sound was not part of the dialogue at the Sundance labs. But the lab's new home at the ranch gives composers and directors access to Skywalker resources, technology and onsite designers, allowing participants to supplement their lab-based education in music with a crash-course background in sound design through this new, hands-on designer model. Throwing sound designers into the mix augments an already rigorous program aimed at bolstering the creative collaboration through composers and filmmakers. Composers, sound designers and directors then work together to create both a score and a soundscape.
It was surprising to learn from Randy Thom, director of sound design at Skywalker Sound, that sound design and music – two elements of filmmaking that should be inextricably linked -- aren't hitting their notes in unison. In the lab, Sundance and Skywalker seek to temper this discord between sound designers and composers.
Thom urges for an early collaboration between sound and music composition. "This idea of getting sound involved beginning with the script hasn't been taught in film schools. Our hope is that we're starting a movement that will take sound more seriously and integrate both of them more fully into the filmmaking process rather than their being the caboose at the end of the train," he said.
According to Thom, young directors are intensely interested in sound from the get-go. "The older, more established directors we work with – especially on big-budget films – have a more conventional notion about sound's role in a movie as a decoration you add to the film at the end of the process," he said. "The idea that sound should factor in early, even in pre-production and at the script level, is bold new territory. But young, wet-behind-the-ears filmmakers love the idea of thinking about sound before you shoot the scene."
Thom cited Benh Zeitlin as one such filmmaker, whose 2012 "Beasts of the Southern Wild," a Sundance darling from the ground up, incorporated innovative sound design in even its most nascent stages. Zeitlin composed the music himself alongside Dan Romer, and together they deftly blended a lively score with the sonic textures of a southern Louisianan bayou.
But this kind of collaboration, according to Thom, is an anomaly. "The communication between composers and sound designers doesn't seem to happen," he said. "You end up with the final mix of the music clashing with the sound, and that can be averted if the two camps are talking together."
One of the goals of the Sundance/Skywalker partnership is to give composers, sound designers and directors the organizational tools to avoid the problems that occur when communication between the three disciplines doesn't happen. "There's potential for sonic conflict. Music and sound effects can mask each other simultaneously so the audience doesn't hear either one clearly. In a way, it's like one big orchestra playing," Thom added.
In a summer of voluminous – in every sense of the word – tentpoles that rattle multiplex theaters with noise, Thom's remarks ring clear as a bell. Along the way, the relationships between composers and sound mixers, and therefore the one between the film and its audience, get lost in the din.
"Now is the right time for sound design," added Keri Putnam. "It's such a critical filmmaking component, which we didn't have the resources to support [previously]. Getting to know the Skywalker people and how they are so attuned to the creative vision of artists, this seemed like a very natural, organic way of building on the support we offer artists, like another color to the palette."
Sundance Institute and Skywalker Sound will reprise their Composers Labs collaboration in summer 2014. Though there is still a gap to bridge between composers and sound designers in film, Sundance and Skywalker have found a pleasant harmony in the meantime.
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