Michael Semanick (re-recording mixer on the animated feature “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”) remembers the moment like it was yesterday, but in fact it was 1976. He was 13. And one day, his sisters came home to their house in the Bay Area and announced, “”Hey, we’ve got tickets to go to a concert!” The concert was Paul McCartney and Wings at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. “It was general admission, and it was my first concert ever,” he recalls during Gold Derby’s “Meet the Experts” Film Sound roundtable. “I wandered off to this area and saw these guys in this little cordoned-off area in the middle of it.” They were doing sound for the concert, and for some reason little Michael was mesmerized. “I just stood there and stayed until the show was over, and then my sisters and their boyfriends said, ‘We’ve got to go.’ And I said, ‘I want to do that when I grow up. I want to be a part of that.”
And so Semanick is, in a career that’s brought him a pair of Academy Awards – so far. Joining him on the sound panel were three-time Oscar nominee Mark Stoeckinger (sound editor on “John Wick: Chapter 4”), four-time Oscar winner Richard King (sound designer and supervising sound editor on “Oppenheimer”) and three-time Academy Award nominee Steve Morrow (sound mixer on “Maestro”). Semanick continues, “The engineers at that (Paul McCartney and Wings) concert introduced me to what live sound was. I was like, ‘Wow, how did this little band make all of this huge sound?’ And that just led to working in recording studios and eventually learning what film mixing was. It’s fascinating to me almost every day, how you can take one sound and trick the audience into thinking that a door slam is a gunshot if you have to.”
How did Stoeckinger know that sound was his career destiny? In his case, it goes back to being a kid and helping his parents record on a reel-to-reel tape deck. “Long distance phone calls were really expensive (in those days),” he recalls, “and my grandparents lived back east. So, our family in L.A. would sit around the reel-to-reel and we’d just talk about what our days were like, what we had been doing, and then send that tape back to my grandparents – who would record their own and send it back. That was my first, I’ll say, audio experience. And then beyond that, I was really fortunate to get into USC Film School, and there’s a sound editor there named Jay Wilkinson, who is the (teacher’s assistant). There was something about what he did that I found inspiring and really sparked my interest to want to pursue this.”
It all started in college for Morrow as well, mostly because in his film classes “every project I had sounded terrible, so I tried to figure out how to make them better,” he admits. “And then that’s when I fell in love. I said, ‘Oh, this is great, I want to do this. And it turns out getting a job on low-budget features in the sound department is much easier than trying to direct them or to be a cinematographer. So that was my path. I went that direction and fell in love with the art of sound. Honestly, on set, not a lot of people know what (I) do. And so as long as you’re doing it right and it sounds good, then you pretty much get left alone to do your job.”
King’s desire for a sound career started in childhood, where he “had a bunch of friends who all made super great movies. They were into the same things I was, music and recording things and making films and art. I went to art school and I wanted to be in films but had xero connection to the film business. So I moved to New York and just went door to door and had to punch my way through concrete to start working on low-budget films. And then about three or four years of (that) eventually included sound editing and a little picture editing. The sound editing part was always the one that to me provided the most creative opportunities…The sky was the limit. I could do anything. I wasn’t limited by anything except my imagination, I found it very freeing and also felt like it clearly added a three-dimensionality to the film that it didn’t have before. So I was hooked.”
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