Peter Burns writes:
The lectures we are getting - especially those regarding post production sound design, editing and mixing are on par with the best film schools in the country (HFI, NYU, USC, UCLA). Because of the legacy of the Saul Zaentz Film Center, we are privaleged to have Mark Berger as well as Dr. Andy Newell, David Bergad, and Dan Olmsted lecture on post sound production. It is remarkable to have the actual sound production experts who worked on The English Patient, The Wild, Amadeus, The Right Stuff, Apocolypse Now and many more at our disposal. These (and others) are classic pictures that changed filmmaking history in ways.

MARK BERGER OPENED HIS 3/13/08 LECTURE WITH, “THE FUNCTIONS OF EFFECTS”
This included:
[1] Defining charcaters’ emotinal states
[2] Defining the activity level and/or energy of a scene
[3] Defining the geography or space of a scene
[4] Providing transitions
[5] Embedded sounds

Other key points were:
[1] Writing sound design into the script
[2] Specific types of transitional sounds (and how to place them)
[3] Grouping kinds of sounds
[4] Using sound sweeeners and “surreal sweeteners”
[5] Cause and effect
[6] Reduced sound and the importance of pre-mixes to reduce tracks
[7] Semantic subtext
[8] An era’s film and theater sound technology and it’s application by a filmmaker in the creative decisions. For this we compared and contrasted The Right Stuff from 1989 with Test Pilot from 1939.

Mark encouraged lots of class participation.

During this lecture, Mark Berger, presented a famous clip from Apocolypse Now and ran it about 5 times: [1] with all final sound tracks; [2] with just dialog tracks; [3] with just Foley and explosions tracks; and [4] with just machine gun fire and rockets tracks. These were all final sound elements from the original mixes that went into the final product. Mark mixed these himself under Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Murch.

Check out Mark Berger’s player card at IMDB:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0074281/awards
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0074281/

Mark ended the lecture with showing the individual mixes in the ProTools sound application. We’ll be picking up here next week.

I had the opportunity to run into Mark Berger in the parking lot post lecture and I thanked him for presenting such a treat to us. He met my two kids, Tyler and Zoe. He was very sweet and shared with me that, he too, enjoyed experiencing these mixes for the first time again in 25 plus years or so.