Website: Soundworks Collection

'SoundWorks Collection' is a website dedicated to providing insightful videos and profiles on music and sound design from the latest films. Many of my favourite composers regularly feature on there, such as Hans Zimmer, Michael Giacchino and Howard Shore, as well as composers for trailer music groups such as Immediate Music, Two Steps From Hell and Thomas Bergersen.

The most interesting aspect of the videos is learning about the initial ideas and stimulus for the music, and then how this developed into the final score. For example, in creating the score for 'Interstellar' (2014) Christopher Nolan wanted to move away from genre and focus on the story of a father and his daughter, which began the process of collaboration with Zimmer. The heavily featured organs were utilized to provide a 'religiosity' to the film, adding to its sense of scale and scope. In the video below Nolan describes his plans for the music.

The videos also feature interviews with sound editors, mixers and recordists talking about the sound design aspects of the film, often per scene which helps with learning the individual roles and responsibilities during production. Some of my favourite SoundWorks videos have been about 'Gravity' (Alfonso Cuaron, 2013), 'Tron: Legacy' (Joseph Kosinski, 2010), 'Oblivion' (Joseph Kosinski, 2013) and more recently 'Interstellar' (2014).

In 'Gravity', they respected the physics of sound in space in their sound design. They also made full use of surround-sound to create a sense of disorientation, overwhelming the audience to mirror what the character is feeling. In an interview with composer Steven Price, he talks about the decisions involved in designing the music for the film - it felt empty without it but a fully orchestral score undermined it. Ultimately, the music's low, synthesised drone comes to representing the antagonistic force in the film - the debris field.

In 'Tron: Legacy' they used a huge variety of effects, filters and synthesized sounds to create the various environments within what is essentially a computer. They added extra ambient sounds in scenes without action where the character is still feeling a sense of unease, and used filters on the character's voices to create a hierarchy among the computerised characters.

Due to the emptiness of the environments in post-apocalyptic 'Oblivion', many sequences simply made use of the absence of nature sounds, instead using ambient sounds like wind and water to enhance the sense of isolation and desolation. They also mention the creative possibilities of surround sound, now having speakers on the ceiling for an added effect, and the collaboration with 'M83' for the film's score.

For 'Interstellar', Christopher Nolan wanted to keep the sound design simple, using largely production sounds for most scenes. Similar to 'Gravity', the physics of sound in space was respected and therefore the only sounds heard inside the shuttle are the effects which space is having on the ship. The video shows the various ways in which the sound designers and Foley artists did this, such as by playing large sub-woofers at certain frequencies in empty scrap planes.