Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age

5. Using the Digital Surround Style

143 Using the Digital Surround St yle What you can do is you can envelop people, but the gimmick of just because it’s there, do you have to be obligated to put stuff in the surrounds? Absolutely not. Marti Humphrey, re-recording mixer I should be pulling [the audience] into the movie. If they’re sitting there and it’s a night scene and they’re in the countryside and there’s a gust of wind and a dog barks way off in the distance back here [in the surrounds], there’s got to be a reason that the dog barks back there. There’s got to be a payoff for that, like a car comes down the road from that direction or something threatening is going to happen from that direction. It can’t be random things [just] because it’s cool to have a sound back there. Richard King, sound designer/supervising sound editor Humphrey and King speak for the community of film sound professionals in recognizing that just because surround sound makes particular stylistic options available does not mean those options are always the right ones to use. The digital surround style of diegetic immersion is no different from any other filmmaking strategy: it is appropriate in some places but not necessarily in others. 5 144 · Production and St yle Earlier chapters identified what new aesthetic elements digital surround sound (DSS) brought to the cinema and how those traits served to bring the audience into the diegetic space of the movie, immersing them in the heart of its three-dimensional world. As acknowledged at the end of chapter 4, these chapters offered a broad, somewhat abstract view of digital surround sound’s use. This chapter moves the discussion of the digital surround style into a more concrete realm by exploring the question raised by Humphrey and King in their comments: where and when should that style actually be deployed? Determining When to Use Diegetic Immersion For sixty years the screen-centric design of monophonic sound (as well as Dolby Stereo) dictated how sound and image are used; that history cannot and should not be discarded lightly. DSS enables the cinema to move away from this long-standing practice, but it is hardly surprising that this transition has progressed cautiously. Anything that could be done with a monophonic or Dolby Stereo soundtrack can still be done with a digital one, and frequently filmmakers will make some use of DSS’s multi-channel environment without embracing the novel strategy of complete diegetic immersion. In practice, use of the digital surround style thus spans the spectrum from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), which deploys the style’s full complement of aural and visual traits in almost every scene, to WALL-E (2008), which combines heavily immersive sequences with more conventionally shot and mixed segments, to Traffic (2000), which was mixed largely in mono for a “documentary” feel and not surprisingly adheres almost exclusively to a traditional screen-oriented aesthetic in other aspects of its visual and aural design as well.1 This mix of approaches does not negate the significance of DSS’s effects any more than the fact that films today may still include blackand -white segments diminishes the importance of color to film. Rather, it shows that the cinema remains in a time of transition—one the reverse of the late 1970s shift Jay Beck explores in “A Quiet Revolution ,” where the introduction of Dolby Stereo sparked a regression. In that case, filmmakers who had been experimenting with new ideas were encouraged to return to more traditional practices; in the current Using the Digital Surround St yle · 145 transition, filmmakers have the opportunity to explore new strategies but always have the safety net of Dolby Stereo–era practices on which to fall back. The specific degree of this shift to the digital surround style is difficult to gauge given that the same movie will often employ fullon diegetic immersion at one point and a screen-centric approach at another. When asserting that the adoption of Dolby Stereo led to changes in cinematic visuals, for instance, Michel Chion admitted that the editing style sparked by this new technology “is only tendential , rarely present in a pure fashion, and in most films it is combined without difficulty with the customary rhetoric of shot-division.”2 The same can be said for the digital surround style: it...