Feb 8, 2013 5:31 PM, By Blair Jackson

Eugene Gearty and Philip Stockton (co-supervising sound editors), Ron Bartlett (dialog and music), Doug Hemphill (FX), Drew Kunin (production)

On sound for the storm scenes
Gearty: One thing I benefit from living down here on the coast of South Carolina is a tremendous amount of thunder and lightning. For years I’ve literally been recording every storm that happens, and then my poor assistants have to go through it all. We’re always looking for that elusive clean, single thunderclap without birds, bugs, wind or rain in it. I’ve gotten a couple of those and I have a big database of thunder. We also get some extremely high winds. I was in a tropical depression, which is a 25 or 30 mile-per-hour wind, and that’s formidable.

For the water and high waves, I got some things from the Mavericks guys [the famous big wave spot south of San Francisco, recently the subject of a feature film] and from places in Hawaii. But I had some tricked-out stuff from [Scorsese’s] Shutter Island [that] I recorded on the coast of Maine. The sound of waves on rocks is different than the sound of the beach, and that worked out really well.

On Ang Lee’s approach
Gearty: I was fortunate to have a director like Ang choose to not use music in a couple of scenes, which really left it open to effects to tell the story. It would have been different if I’d been fighting music the whole time. However, the second storm was all about the music. I had a great time working with Doug [Hemphill, FX rerecording mixer], and Ron did a great job on the music and dialog.

On the challenges of using audio from enclosed tank
Stockton: The whole middle part of the movie Pi is in a tank and there are wave machines and you’d even hear horns sometimes. We tried to salvage the parts where he was crying or really emoting to get as much as we could from that; to get his performance. And there were a few of the speeches from when he was on the water we were able to use production from. When Pi is acting like ringmaster, that’s all production; that didn’t need to be replaced. We had quiet water.

But of course the production [track] didn’t have the tiger on it, so a lot of it is Pi interacting with silence. In a lot of his stuff on the water, the director and people working with Pi knew that track was going to be mainly a guide track. When Pi is emoting on the boat with the tiger, they tried to leave enough room for his lines to be in the clear, but a lot of times Ang was sort of being prompter. You hear him saying, “Okay, now he’s pawing at you,” or “Now this is happening,” mostly to get the look rather than the sound.

One of the other problems with the production sound in that form was that it was a little echo-y being in the tank. It’s outdoors and the walls are higher than the water level. Until the CGI was done, a lot of times you could see the walls in the background; it was pretty bouncy stuff. That was something I tried to do before it got to the mix stage—cutting off the extra echo and toning it out.

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