Gary Rydstrom: "Jurassic Park"

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Gary Rydstrom, MPSE

What Do Sound Effects Do?

Sound effects, to me, are not just to make the unbelievable believable, or to make sounds that make the movie realistic. They're really there for the sake of storytelling. And one of the key things I try to keep in mind when doing sound effects work is how can we use sound effects to help tell a story. For a dinosaur movie -- for "Jurassic Park" -- it's going to give us a sense of fear, a sense of who these dinosaurs are, it's going to tell us things that are happening off screen, it's going to give us a sense of scale. It doesn't really, to my mind, because I’m a sound effects guy, it doesn't play all that well without sound effects. So I will demonstrate this… Steven Spielberg is not in the audience, right? So I’m going to play a clip from "Jurassic Park" with just dialogue. And we’ll get a sense of how that works.

[T Rex attack on a dark and stormy night, DIA stem only]

OK, That's a sense of what it was like without -- pretty much what it sounded like on the set. We also heard some ADR there, recorded in a studio after the fact to get some clean screams from the kids and such.

How Gary Began the Project

So, the first step for me doing sound effects work for "Jurassic Park" was panic. And then what I did was to look for Ben Burtt up at Skywalker Sound. Ben Burtt, a great sound designer, who's done the hardest thing -- to me, anyway -- in sound effects work is to come up with character -- vocals for a creature in a movie. And he did E.T. and R2D2 and Chewbacca, so he was the genius at doing this. And I looked for Ben for advice, and he was on vacation. So I then I went to the second step, which was panic, again. Then the third step was to record sounds.

Gathering Sounds

Now to me, there's no excuse to really panic in sound editing/sound design when you try to come up with new sounds for things, because the world is full of really exciting and inspirational sounds, and you find those sounds in unexpected places. To me, there's no real synthesizer like the real world. And also, sound people are kind of nerdy and we sit in the dark and we don't get out much. So sound effects recording -- you saw some great pictures of Dane's pictures of recording sound effects -- that helps us get out and kind of live normal lives. It's very, very useful to do.

So I'd like to play… these are recordings that were made [of] looking for elements to make the dinosaurs [sounds] in "Jurassic Park." And they're presented in all their raw glory. So they're as they sounded, including bumping of microphones, doing all sorts of crazy stuff. And there's no pictures here. You can play kind of a "guess the sound" game. Eventually, I'll tell you what the animal is, but this is a range of animals I recorded for "Jurassic Park."

[Sounds included swans who promptly stopped making noise once the recording started, a koala bear, a de-barked dog, a whale, an elephant, an angry goose, mating tortoises, Gary's dog “Buster,” and Gary himself vocalizing.]

Sound effects recording tries as much as possible to be cheap. That's why recording myself at the end was an utter failure. What I was trying to do, actually, is -- I was looking for an element for the T Rex roar that I'll play you later, that I never found with real animals. [So] I tried to do it myself, to no avail.

The other important thing to keep in mind with sound effects recording work, to me, is that it's important to have an assistant, in this case I had Chris Boyes, who was my assistant on "Jurassic Park," to record all the truly dangerous animals; and then "you," in this case me, I get to record macaws and my own dog Buster and cute little furry things, and let Chris camp out at night at a retired lion farm, which is what he did, or record rattle snakes and things like that.

What I love about sound effects recording is that you find the unexpected. The koala bear -- we were recording at the San Francisco Zoo when the guy taking us around said "Would you like to record the koala bear?" and I said "I guess. We have a minute." I imagined it would just make a squeak -- some cute little sound. I had no idea what a koala bear sounded like. We walked into the koala bear room and it started immediately doing this BRRRAAHR sound. I had no idea and it made a great T Rex element for "Jurassic Park." It's beautiful to find things like koala bears out in the real world.

The whale blowhole was a surprise how that became useful. I expected the whale vocals to be useful for dinosaurs, but what turned out to be most useful was just the blowhole. We used that for [the] breathing T Rex.

It is dangerous. I mean, the Tegu lizard that bit the owner -- there's this guy that we found who had a reptile shop in Marin County. And he had a lot of legal and illegal animals -- reptiles -- and he brought a bunch to Skywalker Ranch. And he brought this Tegu Lizard -- it was a monitor lizard sized thing and it whipped around. Because it turns out the way to make animals make sounds is to piss them off. So, he was pissing off this Tegu lizard which whipped around and took a chunk out of his arm. He was a big Harley dude and I said, "Do you want one of our security people to come and stitch that up for you or have a look at that?" and he said "No, I'll stitch it up myself when I get home. I have a kit."

He brought in an alligator, too. A nine-foot alligator -- completely illegal. Brought it in this burlap sack, put it in a Foley stage at Skywalker Sound, where it sat there motionless and made not a sound. So he said, "Well, you can record in my house. We keep it in the swimming pool in my house and it makes really great sounds when I feed it." And I said, "What do you feed it?" And he said, "You know those ads in the back of newspapers that say 'bunnies to good home?'" He said, "You might have problems cutting out the bunny squeal." You meet very interesting people recording sound effects.

We ended up getting the sound of alligators from a very nice scientist guy in Florida who recorded some alligators not eating bunnies.

It's good to take advantage of neighbors. I had a neighbor who had a de-barked dog. I didn't de-bark the dog myself, but it made this amazing slicing/breathing sound that I used for the raptor.

I also like to make as much use out of one animal -- and better yet a common animal -- as possible. A simple horse. Recording a horse we got a lot of stuff out of. Eating a cob of corn, the lose teeth and the big cob of corn crunch became the crunch of eating a lawyer in the movie. The snorting -- he would be made at me and he would snort into the microphone. That became raptor breathing, when the raptor shows up and looks in the window of the kitchen and snorts, that's just an angry horse. On top of that, we paraded a male horse in front of a female horse and she squealed in absolute horror. We used that for the Gallimimus dinosaurs being eaten by a T Rex. So, one animal, three dinosaurs -- it was a really good deal.

Building the Sound Effects

The thing with sound design is building… Now these are interesting animal sounds and they're useful in bits. What you want to do is take snippets, tiny bits and pieces of sounds from this that you like. And I had no idea when recording these what they might be used for. You take them back to the studio and you have this group, this library of little "phonemes," little bits of sound that you can now put back together to create new sounds.

Sound effects editing and sound design to me is a lot like knitting. And sometimes I think that it's like quilting. Or sometimes I even think that it's like arranging knick-knacks in a cabinet and you just want the knick-knacks to look right; where you place them, which one looks good… all of these analogies I consider bad and not very manly. So I decided sound effects editing is actually more like flying a fighter jet. But not really. It's more like quilting.

It is a lot like orchestrating music, though. Because you want to take sounds and now blend them together the way that a musician does. When you're writing music for an orchestra you pay attention to frequencies and harmonics and how do sounds blend together and you can layer, both sequentially and in parallel, these little bits of sounds -- the real sounds I've collected -- and put them together to make, in the case of these sounds, and animal vocal -- a dinosaur vocal.

So, I have a demonstration of how the layers are built up for the raptor and T Rex in "Jurassic Park" using a lot of the sounds that we've heard already. You might recognize some of them. It shows you how these are layered together, are built up, to make, ideally, a unique sounding creature vocal.

[Repeating clips of T Rex and Raptor with separate sound elements.]

{During clip: Dietrich Smith is a friend of mine. <big sound> But not after that.}

That's an example of how sounds are layered. So in the case of the raptor, there was no one animal sound that made the sound of the raptor vocals, it really was made up of many, and they were chosen for each of their… But it is orchestrating. It's taking sounds... the strongest example of taking two sounds of different frequencies and putting them together are the walrus sound, which is a very low WRRR, which is cut for the raptor attack scream; and then the dolphin scream which we recorded underwater with a hydrophone of a dolphin in heat, it turned out. A dolphin that made this high-pitched scream. Neither one was right by itself, but if you blend them together you get this high-pitched scream blended with a low walrus -- then together they made the scream of the raptor, so two animals blended into what sounded like a third.

That's the basic key, I think, to turning sounds into things you've never heard before. I love using sounds that you have heard before. I have a theory that, especially these days with visual effects getting so crazy and bizarre with stuff you could never see on real life, that using real life sounds – real animals that we subliminally recognize grounds the sounds. You believe that that’s really a creature. But if you do your job right and you layer it and do other tricks to the sounds, you can make it sound like an animal that you’ve never heard before.

The T Rex [is] the same idea. This also has an example of a layer. The big scream of the T Rex, the low frequencies are lions and tigers and alligators, but the high frequency sound that we’ll get to is this baby elephant we recorded in Marine World. So, lets’ just play the T Rex layers.

[Clip of T Rex approaching and making first roar in movie]

The baby elephant, was like all sound effects recording, a serendipitous event. We were looking for regular elephant sounds and what they made, which was great, in Marine World. Off in the corner, after we tried recording all of these huge elephants and they didn't really make much sound, the guy said "Well, there's this one cute little baby elephant off in the corner and he doesn't really do anything, but…" So they brought him out and we had the microphone on and he made that sound. Pretty much. Just that high… and they loved it. It was perfect. So we spent the rest of the day there trying to get him to do another sound. And he never made another sound. We went back another week later and he didn't make any sound. We went back [when we] did the sequel to "Jurassic Park." He was a teenage elephant. He didn't make any other sound. It was complete happenstance that we got that sound.

So, every time the T Rex roars in "Jurassic Park," that was the high-end element I was looking for -- my orchestration of what he should sound like. I thought that he needed not just a low roar, but a high -- a scary high element. And so I used that frontwards, backwards, I cut it into itself, and extended it, made it shorter, longer… but that's always in there.

And by the way, I did a lot of this stuff on a Synclavier -- which is originally made for music -- to take samples of real sounds and put it on a keyboard, and you can layer sounds on the keys, so each key would have a different approach for a T Rex vocal and I would have up to four animal layers on one key. I could play the T Rex like it was a keyboard. The only problem was that one time someone came into my sound room when I was working and accidentally leaned up and sat on the keyboard of the Synclavier, playing technically, I thought, 44 T Rex roars at the same time. It wasn't very pleasant.

Sound & Picture Working Together

It's very important, I think, to plan ahead for sound. One of the things that good directors like Steven Spielberg do is they think about sound early on. One of the important aspects of the T Rex attack scene which I'll show you on film at the end is that they decided to play it with no music. Which is great! It puts you there. It made it feel not like a movie but like real life. It became scarier. He planned to introduce the T Rex with the sound before you saw it, by hearing it off in the distance before you see it. His use of sound is great, I can't take much credit for some of these great ideas which really come from the director.

He's also very good at wanting to start experimenting with sounds and visuals early on. I can show these fun animatics, show a little bit, because they're an interesting bit of history. "Jurassic Park" came at a time when computer graphics really did take over for traditional visual effects, and it started out with models of all the dinosaurs. So they did animatics of the major scenes with the dinosaurs with these stop motion dinosaur puppets. And I'll show you a little bit of it. I made use of it to start putting in my attempts at what the T Rex would sound like. I'll give you a taste of what that's like. It looks a little bit like the Mr. Bill Show from Saturday Night Live.

[Clip of animatics with temp sounds.]

OK, you can see that it's very hard to make cuts to a still image on a piece of paper. But those were early attempts at what a T Rex would sound like that I could show Spielberg long before he even started shooting. And you'll notice it doesn't have some of the elements that I cut later on. It doesn't have the baby elephant, which to me was the main element of the T Rex. But it gave me something to start talking about, and in sound it's very hard to talk about it, it's much easier to demonstrate it and to play it. And it's very important, I think, in sound work to make sounds early on, play them against whatever visuals you have -- even if they're static -- and see how it comes alive. So, you start playing with those sounds.

Spielberg's very good at thinking far in advance. It actually affected some of the way they shot the film and animated the CG dinosaurs, which I was proud of. They played some of these early sounds on the set to give the actors a sense of what the animals would sound like.

We also came up with some sounds. For the raptor we found this guttural clicking sound that I really loved, and we put it in and it helped, I think, establish a pattern in the animation where the throat of the raptor would undulate -- go in and out. I didn't show you the raptor animatic, but in there they had a little tongue as if it was a reptile, a little forked tongue that comes out and slithers. So with my early experimenting with the raptor sounds I had this little tongue slither sound, which was really fun. It turned out the scientists, who were helping keep the movie in line, somewhat, said that anything that uses its tongue like that is sensing smells, and it makes sense only for animals close to the ground -- not for tall animals like the raptor. So we lost the tongue. But just as an example of why you shouldn't always listen to scientists: after the movie came out there was a scientist in Japan who claimed that I got the sound of the T Rex completely wrong through his research. According to him the T Rex would never roar like a lion would roar, the only sound he would make would be a stomach gurgle. So I imagine in the shots of it roaring I could have just put in huge burps. So you listen to science only so much.

Mixing the Sounds Together

Now, pre-mixes. I'll play a section of this scene now with the finished dinosaur sounds, the T Rex and its footsteps as edited for the final film by itself with no other sound effects so we can show you where we ended up. You can listen for some of the things you've heard so far. My favorite is at the end of this section when the lawyer is eaten. The shaking sound of the T Rex shaking the lawyer back and forth and killing him, is really just my little Jack Russell Terrier Buster playing with a rope toy -- which is the most silent toy I could come up with. You know how dogs try to break the neck of a toy, shake it back and forth. So, you record a Jack Russell Terrier, you slow it down a little bit, you've got a T Rex shaking a lawyer. And, of course, the cob of corn eaten by a horse was for the lawyer.

It's fascinating to me and it's fun to talk about, but when you're doing it it's not something you think that "I'm using the sound of a small dog for this large T Rex and isn't that cute?" I first thought it was crazy. I heard that Ben Burtt, when he came up with the sound of the Rancor beast in "Return of the Jedi" he used a Chihuahua. He went further than I did. There's a law in sound effects work, and I don't know what it is, but [if] you're into sound effects work, think this way, because it works better: if you're trying to make a large beast or even a large sound, sometimes if you record a small sound, you can make it -- by slowing it down, layering on top of it, doing things to it -- you can make it seem bigger than sometimes the biggest sound you will go out and record. I don't know why that is, that's just something I discovered over the years.

Let's listen to the dinosaurs as cut for the scene.

[Clip of T Rex in night attack with only the T Rex sounds.]

My dog Buster is about 16 years old now, he'd be very proud to know that he once made that sound.

I'll play you the rest of the pre-mixes for this scene. We'll go from the most fun and the loudest to equally fun and not so loud.

Sound pre-mixing in mixing is like a funnel. You start pulling together your sounds, taking many sounds, mixing them together, but keeping as many types of sound separate for control so that in the final mix you can control the sound of the dinosaur versus the sound of the crashing versus the ambiences.

So now I'll play you premixes for this section [of] all the rest of the sounds, what those are like.

Foley Effects

We'll start with Foley. Foley [is] recorded on a stage by people performing while watching the film and doing all those little things that really bring the movie to life, to me. So you get a sense of sometimes the cutest little sounds -- including the first sound that you'll hear, is very cute.

[Same clip of T Rex attack at night with just Foley effects. The first sound is the squeak of the window being wiped clean of condensation by hand.]

That's Foley. That's a lot of the sounds of life. They do the little things that really make it fun. And you'll notice, maybe, that that had a lot of echo on it. Some of that Foley. And the reason was that it was mixed in context listening against what the next sound group that we're going to hear, which is the ambiences. The ambience takes up a lot of the space on the track and eats up a lot of the echo we heard. By itself, it sounds like too much echo. But it meant to play with this.

Background Effects

The ambience in this scene, it turns out, is really just rain. It’s nighttime; the only thing we really care about is rain. And because there’s no music, we can deal with a detail of cuts of rain, perspectives of rain that we might not normally be able to do. So I’ll play you a little bit of this to give you a sense of how crazy we are with it. It was a rainy winter in Northern California and we recorded a lot of rain. This is what it’s like.

{T Rex attack, just the rain}

That's all the rain I can take.

Big Sounds

The next level of premixes are crashes. [Now] this represents thirty or so tracks of sounds cut to make this crashing of the T Rex against the car using a lot of favorites of sound effects people. [One of which comes from] when you go to a railroad yard and record when they put the empty railroad cars away in the yard, they roll them down this incline and they just smash into other railroad cars. You get these train coupling impacts. It's really wonderful. I've stopped many a good vacation to go record railroad cars. So that's a little bit of what this is. I'll play you the premixes. This is "A FX" premix, which includes crashes.

[Same T Rex clip with mostly crashes.]

That's my favorite crash at the end. Go from recording railroad cars crashing into each other, to just record your own toilet.

You also heard in there a trick that I used all the time, too. The big crash of the outhouse falling down had a long echoing crash sound in it which turns out to be a howitzer exploding and going off, so that made a great sweetener for crashes, too.

This next premix are … "Crash Sweeteners," things we like to keep control of separately from these major crashes. There's also scrapes and a tire pop and a flare. Now the flare that they hold, the fun thing to notice with that is that we recorded a lot of flares "Doppler," so we would swing them by a microphone/swing a microphone by a flare. Because one of the death knells of sound in a movie is constancy. Change is good in sound unless you really want to be even and lulling. So, in a scene like this, even the sound of the flare, it's good to emphasize change. So Dopplering the flare is a way of getting change.

So, here's … we're up to the B FX premix.

[Same T Rex clip with other crashes, clanks, flares, etc.]

OK, we're going to skip ahead. I'm tired of watching it on video now. So, I'm going to skip the "C FX" premix, though it's really beautiful and someday you'll hear it. My favorite sound effect in the C FX premix to me are "Raindrops on Hat" -- so we had all of the hats covered. Rain on hat is covered very well in the C FX and it's very interesting, but I'm going to skip right ahead to the film so we can keep going.

So, let's show the 35. We'll lead up to this T Rex attack and see if you can hear how these sounds came together for the finished mix.

[Film clip for T Rex attack.]

Questions & Answers

SCOTT HALLER

Ladies and Gentlemen, Gary Rydstrom!

SH: So Gary,

GR: So…

SH: You're a Sound Designer.

GR: <chuckles>

SH: How would you define that job.

GR: Well, "Sound Design" is a tricky little name. But what I took it to mean is… I came at a time when I admired the work of people like Ben Burtt {“Star Wars,” “ET,” “Indiana Jones”} and Alan Splet {“The Black Stallion,” “Elephant Man,” Blue Velvet”}, Walter Murch {“Apocalypse Now,” “American Graffiti,” “The Conversation,”}, and their approach was truly what everyone in sound's approach is, which is to have an overall vision -- and there's no good word [that's] the equivalent of "vision" -- "ausion" -- a good "ausion" of the soundtrack of a movie, to try to carry ideas through from the very beginning to the very end. So I like to mix it and start up, be the person responsible … for that part of the soundtrack.

SH: Thanks. I'll ask that same question of Dane and you'll notice it might be a little different. It's a strange title, but it's a great title. You're also a film school graduate, would you care to talk about that experience?

GR: I went to USC film school, which was great. One of the great benefits of film school is you get to do everything. So I did sound work in school, I also did all the other crafts. It's amazing how it informs anything you do in film to know how all the other crafts work as well. An invaluable experience.

SH: And I believe a reference from a professor ended up with your connection to Skywalker.

GR: I graduated from USC Cinema and then went back to graduate school at USC Cinema, keeping my very narrow focus on my education. Until one day Ken Mura, who was a professor at USC, came up and said "Do you want to work at Lucasfilm?" This was 1983, right when "Jedi" was coming out. It didn't take me long to say "yes." The next day I was in Northern California, and funny how your life goes. I went from L.A., drove to Northern California, and worked there for twenty years.

SH: And then before we open it up to the audience, what are you doing now?

GR: Through one of the great benefits of my time at Skywalker, I got to work on all of the sound work for Pixar films and that developed into an offer from Pixar to go there and direct a movie and to develop a film to direct. My stated goal is to create a movie that takes advantage of sound because it's been my complaint all along that very few movies take full advantage of sound. So if I don't do it, you should let me know.

SH: Great! Any questions for Gary? Yes, you sir.

Audience: Yes, "Jurassic Park" was mixed on an analog board, right?

GR: Yes, it was mixed on an SSL analog board. No digital boards at that time, really.

Audience: So, how is your technique different now using a digital board? Do you do as much premixing?

SH: Could everyone hear the question? "Jurassic Park" was mixed on an analog board. There's now been a digital revolution in sound and everything is digital now, so how is Gary's technique different?

GR: Digital boards provide the opportunity to automate everything. EQ, panning, everything. It's funny. In the old days of using analog boards, if you wanted to pan a lot of things in the premix or in the final mix, you would have to call in everyone down the hallway and in the machine room to grab a pot {a potentiometer, a knob} on the board and play [something] like a game of Twister and you would all try to time out your pans. So the benefit of digital boards was that there was a detail to the mixing you could do on a digital board that you couldn't really do [on analog]. Analog boards, by virtue of what they were, which was good, made mixing more of a performance. Digital boards give you down to the tiniest detail amount of control, which means that sometimes you go too crazy with the amount you can control. So, it doesn't change the amount of premixes, in my experience, it just changes what you can do. And also changes what kind of changes you can do up until the end of the final mix. I think we have much more flexibility. "Titanic" was the first movie I did with a fully digital board, and we changed that sucker 'til the last minute and did things we couldn't have done on "Jurassic Park" because the digital board allowed us to.

Audience: Could you describe a bit your work with composers or … how the director mediates or how you decide what you're going to do. You might spend six months on something and all of a sudden it's all music.

SH: Working with music and composers.

GR: It's a big issue. One of the main things you're dealing with in the final mix is Music versus Sound Effects. Dialogue, you have to hear. That clash between Music and Sound Effects is a well-known clash. And sound effects people think music people are screwing up the movie and music people think sound effects people are screwing up the movie. And sometimes it works really well.

In "Jurassic Park," interestingly enough, John Williams, for whatever reason, composed the score up at Skywalker Ranch. He didn't record it there, but he composed it. He had a room with a piano. What was great was he could come into my room and see what I was doing with dinosaurs. If I was making some sound for the raptors -- I'd play a scene for him and he would say "Oh, your raptors are in the 'cello range, I think I'll avoid that in the score." That's very rare, but it was wonderful. John Williams is a traditional composer. In some ways, Dane will talk about this, modern filmmaking with these amazing composers, now what they can do with sequencers and samplers and such, the ability to work closely with composers is greater with the technology. John Williams is traditional, he writes it down on a piece of paper and you don't really hear it until it's played on the stage -- but he still thought ahead enough that he listened to what I was doing and tried to work around it. On top of that we had someone like Spielberg who was brave enough to let a scene like you just saw to go for a very long stretch with no music, which is a real gift for the sound effects people.

Audience: You get incredible low end on a lot of those T Rex sounds. It's a bassy low end that's still very much in control and the speakers aren't going crazy -- fluttering about like nuts. Any tricks you might share for bass enhancement?

SH: The low end sound of the T Rex.

GR: Well, the key things: First, we've got an element of the sound whether it's an alligator, a real animal sound that covers the low end. You might cheat by slowing down the tape, slowing down the sound to get it really low. On top of that, we sub-harmonic generate using boxes, as far as I can tell, that came from the 70's disco era, right? These sub-harmonic generators, they were for that, I think. And it would take the sound you feed into it and create, at an octave below your main frequency, and give you a harmonically correct really low-end frequency. So that's the first thing.

We had a little trick I'll share with you just because it was fun. For some of the bigger sounds I used a tube amplifier. I'd send sounds through an old tube amplifier and try to fatten up sounds that way. It's amazing how older technology can sometimes still sound better. I don't know it by numbers. I had one of my old Roney (?) friends bring in a tube amp.

Audience: What advice would you have for a current or recent film student that …

GR: Advice for a film student who wants to do sound work. I think that's great. I'm really excited when people want to go into sound. I'm tired of everyone wanting to be a director, right? I say that and then I went and became a director. I love sound work, and what I say, I honestly believe, to people who are going into sound, is that there's still a lot to be done. There's still a lot of room for experimenting and trying things. Sound is an underutilized part of filmmaking. Mostly. So that leaves room for great work. How you get started in it differs for everybody. I was lucky in just getting a job at a place, Skywalker Sound, at a time when Ben Burtt was working there. It was a wonderful place to do sound and I was able to learn from people.

These days, you have both the ability with ProTools and other pieces of equipment to work in your home, and I think that you need to, if you're really interested in sound, do as much as you can. For free, for movies, for whatever you can find -- do the work. On top of that, though, it's good to connect with good companies and good people and try to learn from the people who have been doing it for a while. And learn a lot, and you're there.

SH: I think we have time for one more. Right in the center there.

Audience: "Jurassic Park" was the first movie to be released in DTS. What do you think about it, especially compared to Dolby Digital and SDDS?

SH: "Jurassic Park" was the very first DTS release, and as an aside, DTS had to make special disks for us, of course we're very grateful. And he wants a comparison between Dolby Digital and Sony Digital and other formats.

GR: "Jurassic" put DTS on the map, got it into theaters, and is a part of history that way which I'm proud of. There was a time when we weren't lucky enough to hear six-track sound in theaters very often. 70mm in rare cases. In towns like this you had more opportunities than most. So the DTS and Dolby revolution in six-track digital made a huge difference in how people listen to movies. I was grateful for both.

The politically correct answer about comparing the two is that the job of both DTS and Dolby is to, as faithfully as they can, reproduce what you've done in the mix. And they both do a great job. So any differences you hear between the two of them are fairly miniscule. So I'm just grateful that we have ways for people to hear full-blown six-track sound the way that we want them to hear in the mix room.

SH: Great! Well, Gary in the midst of everything he's doing up at Pixar flew down this afternoon to join us, and he will probably fly back in an hour or so. So, thank you very very much, Gary.

GR: Thank you very much.

SH: There will be a be a five-ten minute break and then we'll question reality with "The Matrix."