SOUND EXPERTS AT WORK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 April 1940, Page 9

SOUND EXPERTS AT WORK

“GULLIVER’S TRAVELS.” AN INGENIOUS PRODUCTION. I There probably are no keener ears or i imaginations anywhere than those of I the sound experts in an animated movie i studio. They can put the half silent vibration of a bird's wings or. a sounu | track and play it back for you, and ■ you feel sure you are hearing Zulu i drums. The men who accomplish 1 things of this sort are having a marvellous time with the new film fantasy, "Gulliver’s Travels." They have been outdoing the natural sounds of nature in the "dubbing" rooms at Paramount Studio, where they placed "Gulliver’s Travels" in shape. Inasmuch as this particular - sound record presented the shriek and crash of a tropical hurricane al sea. with tire winds whistling, the waves thundering, the ship’s timber straining and cracking. and the wreckage grinding together, the task which the sound men left to the artists can be imagined. Il so happens that the noises recorded by the sound stall’ io represent the violent storm that sinks Gulliver’s ship, and casts him alone on the shore of Lilliput, were the sounds of a real storm. The storm recorded was a gale which lashed the coast of Florida, where the Fleischer Animated Studios, Inc., headquarters for al! the drawing in "Gulliver's Travels” is located. It took six of the greatest specialists among them, labouring for one solid year, to get the hurricane into 125 vivid feet of the Technicolour film; which was the length of the sound footage. But the artists got even with the sound men! While the picked six were painstakingly putting in every bubble, every ripple, every drop of water and every fleck of spume that shows singly in the picture, hundreds of their colleagues were busily at work putting the film script of "Gulliver’s Travels" into the next seven reels of the picture in sutfh a manner as to give the sound men the maximum of trouble.

A less ingenious tribe than the studio "dubbers" of the Paramount and Fleischer Studios would have been stumped. They experimented around a bit, however, and discovered that the screech af a pencil sharpener in a stenographer’s office could substitute for the creak of thick wooden wheels in the cart upon which Gulliver's sleeping and tightly bound form was transported from the seashore to the city plaza of Lilliput. The sound men got a strip of film labelled “Angry Goose” off the shelves in the noise effect room at Paramount. Studios, and used the guttural outburst from a goose to serve as the voice of an elderly deaf woman of Lilliput. The croney was supposed to be complaining because none of her panicky neighbours would stop long enough to tell her what their panic was about, following the discovery of Gulliver outside the Lilliputian gates.