Douglas Murray is Sound Supervisor at Ardmore Sound. He told Gary Quinn about his role there and how it all began.
Douglas Murray claims that he was simply in the right place at the right time. A lot. He completed film school in 1976 and, at first, saw his future in picture editing and storytelling. He found his first job on the campaign trail with Jimmy Carter and spent much of 1980 working out of Washington DC as a post-production supervisor with a political documentary production company. After this he became a freelance picture-editing assistant and moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco.
It was a good time. The Hollywood studios traditional structures were collapsing and the Bay Area was rapidly becoming a centre of excellence for independent production. Then Francis Ford Coppola arrived with Apocalypse Now. “That was the first sound job I applied for but unfortunately I didn’t get it. But from that a lot of other productions started to post in the bay area and it began to develop its reputation.” Douglas Murray explained.
Filmmakers like Coppola and George Lucas were moving to the Bay area to escape Hollywood. At the time they were seen as rebels. Dolby stereo had just been invented and suddenly surround sound and new innovative ideas were determining the soundtrack to films. It was a huge leap forward giving a much greater dramatic range. “These new filmmakers seized upon this new format. They developed new ways to produce sound, new ways to use speakers. It was revolutionary and people were enthusiastic about it.” Murray explained.
1983 saw Douglas Murray take his first sound role on a film called On the Edge. “I was very successful very rapidly. I was already quite experienced working as I had since 1976 in various film roles. I knew what sound and picture editors did, and had been post-production supervisor so I had a lot under my belt when I became an entry level sound assistant and so I rapidly progressed to becoming a supervising sound editor in two years,” he explained.
Since then he has worked on some of the biggest films in the US including Contact and An English Patient. So how did he find himself in Ireland?
Having been to Ireland many times with his Irish wife, he moved here some years
ago to work with Ardmore Sound. At the beginning the key difficulty was sourcing
experienced staff.
“A huge part of what we have been doing is training people. We took people who had been working in music studios and trained them to be assistant sound editors. We had to train all the people that we were going to use.” He explained. Ardmore have facilitated an advanced sound supervisor course, a mixing course, and they have plans to have another sound editing course and another assistant course.
Almost all of the shorts in Ireland have their sound post-production work carried
out in Ardmore. However with a fixed allotment for their post production work
they can find the job difficult. They receive £2,500 for their sound work but given
the costs of post this doesn’t go far. “We basically subsidise those quite heavily.
I mean £2,500, that’s equivalent to one day of mixing, but we sometimes give
them two days of mixing, and two weeks of sound editing and an additional day
of Foley and a full day of ADR.” He explained.
Ardmore Sound look on this as an investment but quite naturally it is not
something they actively encourage. As Douglas Murray points out “Kodak
doesn’t subsidise them with free film, the labs don’t subsidise them with lower
rates for doing their blow ups or titles. We are happy to help these young
filmmakers when we can and it is warranted, but their budgets should reflect the
real cost.” he said.
Technological development has led a new revolution in sound production. Now with digital technology superseding previous technologies the playing field has moved again. “Its less labour intensive in a way. It takes fewer people less time to do more work. The equipment is much more expensive and requires much more training to use. Its incredibly powerful these days what you can do with a PC but it is expensive compared to what people used to use. The equipment rental is now a couple of thousand pounds per week.”
Having worked on big budget films in the US and in Ireland he has had a lot of
opportunity to evaluate how much directors value sound. Like all people he likes
working with people who appreciate his job. “Working with David Lynch is great
because he is a very innovative director who really appreciates sound. I believe
that a lot of the impact of his films is due to the soundtrack more so than most
directors. It‘s because he gets personally involved with the soundtrack. During
the process of mixing he plays with the sound, asking us to distort it, play it
backwards, slow it down, do funny things that nobody would have ever thought of
doing because they are so off the wall and he would find an artistic way to use
that sound in the mix.”
He equally enjoys working with Irish directors. He particularly likes working with directors who are willing to take risks with sound. Consequently new shorts directors spring to mind when pressed to name his favourite projects here. “They have been fun from an innovation point of view. The first that I worked with was James Kelly of the Kelly family. He wanted the sound to be a really big deal. It was the first short that I mixed here and although he isn’t well known as a filmmaker he was very good. He comes from a musical background and that fed into his sound work.” he explained. Other shorts which he enjoyed working on recently were Forecourt, one of the Shortcuts series and Mortice from Northern Ireland, one of the Premiere shorts series.
On a feature level he remarks on When the Sky Falls and Neil Jordan’s, In Dreams. “In my opinion he is the most cinematic filmmaker working on features in Ireland. I mean his films are tremendously sophisticated, the performances are great, the visuals are great, the editing is great, the blocking and unfolding of the story from a cinematic point of view is incredibly sophisticated. In Dreams was an incredibly rich film.”
Only too aware that not everyone shares his passion for the sound production process, the best advice he would give to new filmmakers is to talk to professionals before you start your production. “It’s a growing area. You used to be able to do a mono mix, now you have to do a digital mix, be prepared to release on DVD and all of these new technologies. They put higher demands on sound and it takes time and money to produce these things.”
With Ardmore Sound booked up until August 2000 this should be taken seriously. Although it is cheaper to do the same amount of work, expectations have grown. Audiences have become more discerning and people want higher quality sound. “The cinema experience has to be something they can’t get anywhere else. You might have expected to spend £30,000 for a feature film mix 10 years ago but now you would expect to pay £50,000 at the bottom end of the market for a feature.
He advises that the post production house should look at the script before shooting begins. “A lot of producers don’t think about sound. They think about it in a very narrow way. They need to put in a proper budget at the beginning because at the end what happens is that they come to us too late and they can’t get in, or they don’t have the money to do what they want.” He explained.
