Audio Engineering in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers contains one of the most astounding sound tracks ever. It is over 160 minutes long. The film and soundtrack is full of the energy and passion of the people who worked on it. The soundtrack was done at Abbey Road Studios, of Beatles fame. The actual final mix, with vocals, foley and the soundtrack was done in New Zealand.
People
The composer of the Trilogy music is Howard Shore, of SNL and Lighthouse fame. He slaved away and ended up with a ten hour score for the trilogy. The combined length of the three films is about 11 hours. He later tailored parts of the score to fit each movie as the fine cut was finished. The score was composed using many elements often seen in opera. While Wagneresque in length, he used a wonderful variety of techniques as so not to be boring. He conducted during recordings as well.
Paul Broucek was the executive producer and and Peter Cobbin was the head mixing engineer. Peter Jackson directed the film.
The Story
The music was recorded through the summer and fall of 2002. The team used a few rather expensive Pro Tools systems and recorded directly to a disk array. Tracks were then transfered to a 2 Terabyte hard disk array installed at Abbey Road. After all of the tracks were collated and collected on the disk array, the mixers started doing their thang. As basic balance and effects work was in five mix rooms on Abbey road, the master editing was done in a penthouse mix suite by Broucek and Cobbin. Cuts were then played to the director and composer, then tweaked some more. Finally, when the score was done, it was sent uncompressed to New Zealand, where it was mixed into the master audio track for the film. Occasionally, Peter Jackson asked for other takes of various parts, and those had to be sent as well.
The instrumental and vocal music was recorded seperately at the insistance of the director. This is because he wanted to be able to balance the vocal parts of the sound track against the dialogue in the movie. If they weren't separated, then the vocal volume would be slaved to the orchestra. This led to a host of technical difficulties, since the vocals had to be dubbed over the instrumental tracks. Usually, recording instruments, then vocals is standard, but in classical music and when working with 150 orchestral members and 60 choral memebers, the task gets markedly harder.
Several things are quite interesting about this project. The score was partailly re-composed to a fine cut of the film, so it was tailored to fit exactly to the picture. Most producers choose to do the soundtrack recording and film editing at the same time, elimintating the possibility for total integration between the picture and soundtrack.
Equipment
Most of the choral music was recorded in Abbey Road's studio 1. This room has a wood floor and dates from the 1920's. The acoustics are usually described as almost perfect. The orchestral recordings were done at the CTS Colosseum at the Watford Town Hall. The recording artists decided to go with a ProTools based system, over Nuendo. This fully digital system was a large improvement over the tape-based recording of The Fellowship of the Ring. Instead of putting all their eggs in one basket, two seperate recording devices were used. As stated above, everything was recorded and transfered to a two terabyte array at Abbey Road.
Six mix rooms were rented at Abbey Road to complete the project. Each room was equipped with a Pro Tools system and a 48 track mix board. All of the rooms were linked by fiber optics to the 60 drive SAN. Composer Howard Shore was put up in a London hotel room during the mix. He had a pair of speakers set up in his room linked by ISDN to Abbey Road, so he could proof mixes there, instead of going all the way down to the studio. Many microphones were used. I won't give full a full technical description, as that would be many pages. In short: Large diaphragm Neumanns were used, along with AEA ribbon mics and TLM-50s. The DPA 4006 Condenser mic was also used extensively for instruments.
The recording setup was interesting. Sound went from the mikes to a pre-amp, then to an analog to digital converter, then a to a router. The sound was ported to both the Pro Tools computer and a Sony digital mix board for backup. This ensured that the "perfect track" would not be lost.
The music was mixed in stereo as well as Dolby 5.1 surround sound. Many theaters use Dolby Digital 6.1 EX, which is backwards compatible to 5.1.
Overall, the recording of this film was an amazing feat of technology and creativity. Now that the producers have the technology figured out, I expect The Return of the King to be even better.
Sources: EQ-January 2003 and American Cinematographer-December 2002