Gallery: Inside the Lair of the Guy Behind Film's Most Iconic Sounds
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Along with industry icons like Ben Burtt and Walter Murch, Randy Thom fought to give sound design the same priority as visual design in cinema. So far he's won two Oscars, one for 1983's The Right Stuff and the other for 2004's The Incredibles.
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Thom's first job in film was working as a sound effects recordist on Apocalypse Now. This Japanese version of the poster was designed by the late Eiko Ishioka, who won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design on Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula.
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Skywalker Sound upgraded its audio systems last year, replacing most of the speakers in editing bays and in the Stag Theater, its private screening room, with cabinets from Berkeley-based Meyer Sound. Thom has a 7.1-surround setup in his office. You can see the speakers mounted near the ceiling. Fun fact: One of Meyer Sound’s first products was the 650 subwoofer created for the 70-mm touring version of Apocalypse Now.
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Like nearly every other audio professional, Thom runs Pro Tools. He uses a special search engine called Soundminer to access Skywalker's massive sound library. How massive? It has 11,000 different wind effects.
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Before becoming a sound designer, Thom worked in radio and music recording, which at least partially explains his love of old-timey microphones. Spring-mounted carbon mics like this one by Shure were popular for radio broadcasting in the 1920s. The springs keep the carbon granules inside the transmitter from touching the diaphragm during operation.
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Small reel-to-reel tape recorders like these were the go-to rigs for movie and television production for nearly four decades. Earlier recorders had to be hauled around on trucks, but portable battery-powered models gave directors access to locations they'd never had before.
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Thom considers analog recorders like this Nagra III ideal for capturing explosions, since the tape compresses peak frequencies and creates a sound more “pleasant to the ear” than digital distortion.
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Arguably one of the most recognizable mics ever produced, the RCA Type 77 was the benchmark of microphone design from the mid-'50s to the late '60s. Thom purchased this one for 1983's The Right Stuff, the film that earned him his first Oscar. He recently used it to track dialog for Fox's forthcoming The Peanuts Movie. “We wanted to be faithful to the old ribbon-microphone sound of the original Peanuts recording.”
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Used primarily for outdoor recording, this Schoeps rig has two mics in what's called a midside stereo arrangement: One microphone picks up sounds coming from straight ahead; the other, bidirectional unit picks up sounds coming from the sides. Combine the two signals in the right way and you get a reproduction of the stereo field, Thom says. “It's kind of cool.”
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Thom twirls a cable in the air to approximate a wind noise. He crafts many of his own sounds at Skywalker’s recording facilities. Those big wooden structures behind him are sound diffusers: They’re used in recording studios to mitigate echoes and sound reflections.
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Commonly referred to as the Big Elvis mic, the 55c was part of Shure’s visu- ally iconic Unidyne series. Elvis crooned into a lot of them.
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A familiar sight in professional film, broadcast, and television studios around the world, Neumann’s 8-inch-tall U87 condenser mic has a warm, balanced sound that makes it a perfect general-purpose tool for recording the human voice.
