Film is a very environmental thing for me. As long as I can remember, there were film cases in the living room. All the people in my childhood seemed to have something to do with art of some sort, and a lot of people were working on guerilla documentary film crews.

There’s a photo of me as a very young child with my arms in a t-shirt as if I was changing magazines on a camera. That’s what I would see my dad do, changing the film in camera magazines. So I was mimicking him, with my toys.

Music came after my exposure to film in the tangible sense. When I was seven, I started taking my first drum lessons. I didn’t really grasp it with passion until I was 12 or 13, and that’s when I started playing in bands. I was also building my own instruments, restoring them and modifying them. I think that was my passion originally, but I think it definitely turned into motion pictures.

How did your experiences as a drummer help you craft an ear for sound design?

Since percussion instruments are such a foundation for the physics of sound, each instrument is a mechanical schematic of the sound process. It really set me up to begin to understand making sounds and tuning them to the needs as you need them in movies.

We would often make special props to produce sounds that we would record in foley or something for special application in a movie. Robocop, for example, had to have a particular footstep. We would explore different materials and end up building props that could be manipulated by a foley artist. That function is the most basic approach to sound design. I think if you’re making something organically for an unusual application that is sound design.

Sometimes the term "sound editor” seems like a catch-all for anyone who works on any aspect of sound in the post-production process. What does a sound editor actually do?

The term sound editing kind of is a general term—everything from dialogue editing , which is a very specific craft, to foley, which also has unique requirements, to effects cutting and sound design .

What’s interesting in sound design in terms of sound editing, is that it really is just sound effects cutting, because that’s what sound effects editors have always done. They’ve always used the "wrong” sound effect to convey something unique and fresh to that moment.

It’s kind of interesting, the term sound design has become very popular with the advent of computers and technology and I would imagine especially with the games too. Sound editors are the mechanics, but there’s definitely an art to it. Movies sound a certain way, and our job is to maintain that, and hopefully develop it to a new level.

How has post-production sound evolved since you started in the early 1980s?

So much of the old way involved carrying heavy boxes. A box of film that contained eighteen channels of audio in mono single-stripe weighed sixty pounds, and that was for a ten-minute reel.

But that being said, there was a great satisfaction to breaking a sweat. If you’re cutting something and rewinding it or building units, having that resistance, you kind of know you’re alive.

When you’re working on Pro Tools all day long, you can sit there and be looking at sub frames - looking at the actual waveform - and barely moving your trackball a quarter-inch for hours on end. You can make a track sound fantastic, but at the end of the day, your body is just wretched from the tension.

It’s interesting; I think that in the end, when you listen to the sound that you are producing and you’re making decisions, you’re not using a computer for the listening. You kind of have to step back and have it affect you in a more living kind of way. It has to couple with you, and move you emotionally.

Do you think the advantages of having computer-based sound design are worth it?

There are so many pros. You can do so much more now because there is much less effort required. The techniques for doing sound design in the old days involved using a lot of analog outboard gear and using varied speeds and using the mixing stage as a giant multi-track recorder.

It’s very a labor intensive and real estate intensive way of working. You could have all your tracks filling up shelves in our storage room until they’re hung on the dubbing machine.

Now, with Pro Tools and the array of plug-ins that we have, you can try something and if that doesn’t seem right then you try something else. In a plug-in, you can have a whole range of choices – you can automate it and have it do wonderful things.

That is always amazing to me, that you can really stack your processing within a Pro Tools session, having tons of busses and lots of things going on. You couldn’t do that back then.

Sound editors seem to work a lot of hours during a film. Do you find that true to your own experience? What’s the key to surviving the all-nighter?

I try not to do an all-nighter. I’ve done that, and my head still hurts still from that time five years ago when I said, "I’ll never do that again.”

I love the work that I do, and it’s the coolest job in the world, but I think you have to try and balance it with real life. It’s really important. It’s sort of like digging a hole. If you just keep digging, it takes more time to get out and recuperate.

If you’re going to do another job right after that one finishes, hopefully you’re not in a state of recovery while you’re on the next job, because that’s only going to skew the way you hear and feel about things. I’m the first one to get tunnel vision with a project. Everyone I work with does that, but I really think that you have to maintain some sense of health.

What was the most rewarding project you’ve worked on to date?

I have two. The most recent project, War of the Worlds, and the other project is the movie I did called Insomnia.

I did almost all the sound design for Insomnia. Curt Schelkey, my partner, did some dialogue sound design that was on the mixing stage. Pretty much I cut that entire thing myself on the sound design level. There are some other people on the crew that I couldn’t have done it with out them. For me, that was a really huge thing, I had it in my mind on how I thought it should be, and I worked hard to get it done. It was one of my first supervising jobs -- I had a vision for it.

War of the Worlds is different because I was working for Richard King, who is a fantastic sound designer in his own right. He carried the vision for the whole project. We had several sound designers working with him and I was one of them.

That was really satisfying because we were working together - if someone hit a wall, we would listen and talk and share ideas. It was a collective, and it was very satisfying to work that way on something this complicated.

In War of the Worlds, there are some sounds that are biological but mechanical. We don’t know what they are, but they move like they are a biological form.

How did iZotope’s products help you out on War of the Worlds?

First of all I really was impressed with Trash. As a sound editor, I use one sound the "wrong” way to achieve a totally different sound.

Trash is fantastic for that, because it has a spectrum of cabinets that don’t really sound like cabinets. I always use them to make motor effects, or to make it sound like the materials are different from how the sound is actually constructed.

It was really good for what we were trying to do, because this movie has to sound terrestrial in an unfamiliar way.

I think Ozone - the multi-band mastering and EQ - was really great at shaping in a mastering sense. I would use it to form a sound into the shape I actually needed, after it had been mutilated, so to speak.

I would find that I would process something to the point where it had the qualities I was going for, using any number of plug-ins in the path, and I would go back to Ozone at the end of the chain and use that to do a multi-band compression.

Spectron was what drew me to the product line. I used it in a similar way to Trash. You work on layers in the sounds, and you color it or shape things in different ways. If one doesn’t work you try another. Having them available to you at the same time gives you a lot of choices.

Do you have any specific favorite features?

On Ozone it’s the Multi-Band Dynamics. I use that quite a bit, and the Mastering EQ stage, with the parametric and paragraphic equalizing. In Trash, I never went back to the same thing. I would listen to the whole spectrum each time because they produce such different characteristics with different information being fed into them.

Any last thoughts?

I really think you guys are on to something fresh, keep going with it!