Jurassic Park (Mix Analysis)

Sound Designer – Gary Rydstrom
Supervising Sound Editor – Richard Hymns
Dialogue Editor – Sara Bolder
Sound Effects Editor – Teresa Eckton, Ken Fischer
Re-recording Mixer – Gary Rydstrom
Re-recording Studio – Skywalker Sound

I chose the 1993 film Jurassic Park. The head sound designer for the film was Gary Rydstrom, who has an impressive catalog of work. Over his career he has won a total 7 Academy Awards for films like Saving Private Ryan, Titanic, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The sound effects crew was overseen by George Lucas, though, as all the sound was done at Skywalker Ranch.

Jurassic Park was actually the first film released in DTS format. DTS is a multichannel audio developed as a competitor to Dolby Digital. For mixing the film, Rydstrom used an SSL analog console. He created various premixes of foley, background effects, crashes, and crash “sweeteners.” These could then all be worked with to create the final mix.

Since there are no records of what dinosaurs sounded like, Rydstrom had some creative liberties. Instead of getting sounds from a library, he had his team go out and record sounds. For the dinosaurs, they collected a bunch of sounds from different animals. For example, the T-Rex was achieved by mixing a baby elephant, a tiger, an alligator, and a whale. He put all the samples onto his keyboard, so that he could “play” the T-Rex. Rydstrom also says, “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.”

Another interesting mixing technique was done with the foley. In one scene where the T-Rex is attacking at night, there is a ton of echo on the foley. Rydstrom says that by itself it doesn’t sound that good, but when you play it with the ambience effects that are also in the scene, it fits in.

With the gear we have at Towson, we could take some of the handheld recorders to capture some animal sounds to mix for the dinosaur noises.

Map:
1:34:30 – Galloping in the distance, reverb
1:34:51 – Footsteps from characters
1:34:52 – Noise from dinosaur, sounds like a hawk
1:34:59 – Dinosaur passes in front of screen, noise pans from right to left
1:35:02 – Dinosaurs stepping on tree branch, thumping when they hit the ground
1:35:18 – T-Rex makes noise as it appears from the left side of screen, crushing foliage
1:35:20 – T-Rex bites other dinosaur and it squeals
1:35:27 – T-Rex shaking the dinosaur back and forth (Rydstrom’s dog)

http://www.mpse.org/education/bigmovierydstrom.html