Sound Design in 'The Lord of the Rings'

Having seen ‘The Hobbit) last night, I was reminded of the epic scale and brilliance of ‘The Lord of the rings’ sound design. The one thing that really stood out to me and prompted my research was Galadriel’s voice. It is deep and slightly unworldly. I found some videos from the DVD extras which went into great detail on how the soundscape of the film was created. Galadriel needed to sound otherworldly, this was to enhance the dreamlike quality of her scenes in the movie. I always wondered how they did this. A rather simple sounding trick of recording the dialogue slightly faster so that it could be slowed down and still be audible. This technique gives her character that extra level of depth. Especially in the film where there is not that much back story to her. It creates the feeling of how old and wise she is. This great booming voice has an otherworldly depth to it that adds such overwhelming sense of age, grace and knowledge to her character. Another thing that struck me was how creative they had to be. They were in a sense creating the sound of a different world from scratch. Faced with creatures and characters of imagination and fantasy. I found it fascinating how they created these sounds. I like the fact that Director Peter Jackson, would explain what sort of sound he wanted or individual creatures then the sound team would go out and create them. The creativeness and imagination that was required was incredible. I think how they took sounds like walrus roars and processed them to make them sound like mythical creatures. The layering of sounds is also something that is really clever. The Cave Troll for example. His breathing is a combination of a Tiger and Canadian lynx. By doing this I feel that a sound so unlike anything on earth is created. The audience are dawn in and it is believable that this is what this creature really sounds like. The Battle scenes to me seem to be the most complex and difficult to build up. They show how they create the sound of an arrow. I imagined that they would record arrows being shot and layer that up. However it is actually comprised of several different sounds to create a sound that is believable. Something I thought was really incredible was the effort they went to with the mines of Moria sound. To make it sound as if it was in a cavern they took all the sound effects and played then through speakers in concrete tunnels near Wellington, then recorded that. I think that this shows how much they were going to create this world as if it was real. Rather than use the reverb effect which could have sounded fake, they created it themselves with a cave. The main lesson that I have taken away from looking into this is how resourceful a sound designer has to be in creating their sounds. You may be asked to create something from scratch that has little to no bearing in reality. Also again it reinforces the idea that sound is key to making a film believable to the audience.