01.29.2010
Frank Serafine discusses his sound design for Tron (and many others) with Tron Wiki founder Max Petrosky
In this exclusive q&a interview, Tron Wiki founder Max Petrosky discussed with Mr. Serafine about how some of the movie’s most memorable sounds were created and how they were put together using technology no one have ever used before for sound editing.
“Petrosky: How did you get the job for Tron?
Serafine: Well, my first film in Hollywood was Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And I had just done that the year before. I had worked for Disney before, I had worked at Disneyland for the grand opening of Space Mountain out here in Anaheim. That’s kinda what got me into the Disney organization and then I was submitting sound effects for The Black Hole, which was, you know, a sci-fi film that Disney was working on at the same time they were doing Star Trek 1…Then when Star Trek 1 was, you know, a huge success, I contacted Harrison Ellenshaw, who was one of the visual effects producers on Tron at Disney through it’s very early stages of production. He ended up contacting me back and I ended up coming in and meeting with the director and they had hired a music and sound supervisor by the name of Michael Fremer. Michael came over to my place, I was really just kind of a struggling musician at that point, even still I’ve done Star Trek, but you know, that was my first film, which was crazy and I was still just kinda getting into the business at that point. I had done a sequence in Star Trek, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the scene. They call it the “Spock Spacewalk” and he goes outside the ship and he’s looking for things through this, like, astro landscape. And it was an $8 million visual effect done by visual creator of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Doug Trumbull. It was just unbelievable and I did all of the sound effects for that scene, which was an $8 million visual effect scene. You know, there were looking for somebody who really create incredible sounds for all these vehicles that they were going to have in Tron. All the lightcycles and the recognizers and Sark’s aircraft carrier, all these different vehicles so that scene really blew them away, and they hired me to do Tron. That’s how I got the job.
Petrosky: It really does sound fantastic. Tron is the movie that got me interested in sound effects and made me want to pursue a career in sound.
Serafine: You know, that’s interesting that you say that. The director that I’m working with right now, Brett Leonard, he did Lawnmower Man which I kinda feel is the Tron of the 90′s. And then he did Virtuosity with Denzel Washington and we’re doing work right now. Back when I did Tron, he was like 17 years old and he was an usher at the Mann Theater in Westwood and one of the movies that he loved, probably because it saw it a million times was Tron. He said, “God, when I do my first movie, I’m going to get the guy who did the sounds for Tron and then when he did his first movie, he called me up and I did the sound for Lawnmower Man.
Petrosky: How did you make the sound effects for the disk flying through the air?
Serafine: That was a combination of a monkey scream backwards processed through a flanger and it was also another one of those weird synthesizer effects that I was able to create through the modulator and also I took a big wire cable spin and that was the whooshing element. The monkey was kinda like the element that was suppose to come around your head because we were doing a lot of surround effects with that disk throw stuff and we wanted it to be kinda like something that flew around your head and really scare you, you know, monkeys are kinda freaky sounding. So, I turned it backwards and you couldn’t recognize that it was a monkey scream really. I affect the pitch the little bit, you know, what I like to do was back then I was using 1/4″ tape recorders so I able to create really interesting elements by just turning the speed up and down on the tape recorder. That’s the thing, a lot of the new digital work stations don’t get you the sort of controllers and things we had back then to create special sound effects. They don’t exist in the digital world right now. I’m creating a plug-in called the “Serafine FX Tron” from Sonic Reality and it’s going to be a plug-in that you can play either through Infinite Player powered by Kontakt, Pro Tools, Logic or Soundtrack Pro and you’ll have all the fun stuff that we had back then: turning the sound backwards, affecting the pitch, manipulating all the elements and having a really strong search database engine to find all the effects in the library quickly and then you’ll be able to perform on a keyboard, the same way I did it in Tron. We’re developing that right now because it doesn’t exist and it’s very hard for people, they just basically take sounds out of a library and stick it into Pro Tools and that’s it.” – Max Petrosky, Tron Wiki
