Walter Murch - Research Paper Example

of the of the Concerned 11 July Walter Murch Walter Murch happens to be a famous and renowned American sound designer and film editor. Much forayed into the arena of sound designing and film editing with Francis Coppola’s well known movie The Rain People, in 1969. In fact, Murch ventured into the fine art of sound designing much before he started to work as a film editor. Murch is also known to be associated as a film editor and sound designer with varied other memorable productions like THX 1138, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The English Patient, Julia, Cold Mountain and American Graffiti.

Walter Murch attracted the Academy Award nomination for sound mixing for Francis Coppola’s movie The Conversation, in 1974. Not to say, Walter Murch succeeded in collecting his well deserved first Academy Award in 1979 for his work in Apocalypse Now. Walter Murch is credited to be the only person who has ever won an Academy Award for both sound mixing and film editing (Last B08). Walter Murch also directed a movie Return to Oz in 1985. It goes without saying that in the contemporary cinema, Walter Murch is vouched to be an authority in the realm of film editing and sound mixing.

Murch is justly credited to be the father of the discipline that is today known as ‘Sound Designing’ (Last B08). He is also ascribed with the honor of developing the much adhered to 5.1 channel arrays, the standard film sound format, which raised the art of sound designing to new heights (Last B08). Murch happens to be the single most important person and technician who have made stupendous contributions to the discipline of film editing and sound processing. As per his views evinced in an interview with Michael Jarrett, Murch delineates his approach to sound in relation to images by declaring that when it comes to sound, a sound designer always tends to have more freedom as compared to images (Online).

The task of mixing and designing sounds is constrained by much fewer rules as compared to editing images (Jarrett: Online). Murch believes that the emotion, rhythm and story tend to be the most important three things that govern the task of image editing (Jarrett: Online). Yet, the interesting thing is that the constraints and possibilities imposed by the emotion, rhythm and story are as applicable to the task of sound designing and mixing as image editing. While mixing sound, what a sound designer essentially intends to do is to try something that in a way emphasizes the emotion which a sound designer intends to solicit from the end viewers (Jarrett: Online).

In that context, it is as much possible to achieve the intended result through sound designing as through image editing. When it comes to rhythm and story, the task before a sound designer is to choose such sounds that help the viewers feel the desired rhythm and story (Jarrett: Online). No doubt, Walter Murch is a veteran sound designer and film editor, who realistically speaking redefined the discipline of sound designing and editing. Works Cited Jarrett, Michael. “Sound Doctrine: An Interview with Walter Murch”.

11 July 2011 . Last, Jonathan V. “A master film editor unwinds: Revealing metaphysics and magic of the Cuts”. The Washington Times 22 September 2002: B08.