What Do Troy and the Titanic Have In Common?

For years now, Peter Michael Sullivan has been the man behind the sounds in movies by directors like Wolfgang Petersen (Troy, Poseidon, Air Force One or The perfect Storm) and the legendary James Cameron (Titanic, Terminators, The Abyss). Since all of you saw most of these motion pictures I guess you have already formed an idea on what they sounded like. Well, it was all PM Sullivan "behind the desk" making action sound good. Now he speaks about his job and his tools, in a very nice interview with iZotope.

In fact, it is all a big piece of advertising for iZotope's new tool, the Spectron, but heck, that's the way things are done! At least both PM Sullivan and iZotope are fair and don't make a "wonder" out of this interview but make it look rather more natural and even raising the interest in reading it.

It's nothing fancy, nothing that glamour people are almost every time looking for: but for the sound production/editing enthusiasts Sullivan's words are quite a slice of the best cake. He speaks about his most soliciting movies (don't think the T's were in the list, it was What Dreams May Come, much to my surprise as well) and about how is a sound designer forced to think and act in his relationship with the movie directors.

This interview (rather lengthy and very consistent) is a true "mind-opener" for those who think they want to go on and become sound specialists in the industry; it clearly shows that this work means a lot more than knobs and waves - it's about digging deep inside oneself such as to be able to come up with the basic theme to fit best... processing it until it gets to the final wall-shaking envelope is just the work of machines and computers. Peter Michael Sullivan says is loud and clear, that there is more to a movie than images and sounds, they must live and blend together if you want a serious emotion... he says that both Ozone and Spectron have provided him with a completely new set of creative horizons, especially that he's a fan of band-split editing/processing.

And if we've gotten to band -processing, the latest power-tool in the iZotope family is the brand-new Spectron, a band-splitting dynamics and FX, one of the most accurate and possibilities-offering plug-in available now. The control over your sound is almost absolute since it relies on user-specified freq-bands (virtually an infinite number of them) and it will allow unprecedented mix-solutions to be used. It's only up to the editor's imagination and aural vision...sky is the limit!

For example, you can set the trigger for a specific range of frequencies' delay so as to be the volume envelope: namely, you play your guitar slow and quiet and nothing changes - press a drive-stompbox and hit the strings hard in the beginning of a solo and the much higher volume on the specific guitar's frequencies will trigger the specified delay FX. Come back to the picked chords you played first and things come back to normal... Whaddya say? Cool, huh?

Check the iZotope webpage for the whole interview with Peter Michael Sullivan and for Spectron as well. If you already liked the iZotope plugins prepare to fall in love!

Photos by iZotope.