Sound: Odds & Ends: The Polar Express and Eraserhead

An Example of Sound Effects Acquisition: The Polar Express Sound effects were collected for The Polar Express (2004; D: Robert Zemeckis) from the Pere Marquette 1225, a 1941

steam locomotive in Owosso, Michigan.

Further, the overall design and profile of the engine was used by the artists to create the animated 1225 in The Polar Express.

The Pere Marquette 1225 was put into service in December 1941 just as the U.S. entered WWII. Retired from service in the 1950s, it was donated to Michigan State University in 1957, where it sat unused.

The locomotive remained on static display near Spartan Stadium on the Michigan State campus in East Lansing, Michigan for a decade. During this time, a child named Chris Van Allsburg used to stop by the locomotive on football weekends, on his way to the game with his father. He later stated that the engine was the inspiration for the children’s book he wrote, The Polar Express. (!!!)

The MSU Railroad Club worked on the engine for many years. The Pere Marquette 1225 was moved to Owosso in 1983, where it is now part of the Steam Railroading Institute of Owosso. Since 2004, 1225 has hauled winter weekend excursions between Thanksgiving and the middle of December, due to copyright issues, as the "North Pole Express.“

Appropriately, the locomotive's road number is the date of Christmas, 12/25.

Images from The Flint Journal and The Independent

The Pere Marquette 1225

The Polar Express Tim Nielsen (left) and Will

Files of Skywalker Sound record the sounds of the Pere Marquette 1225 in Owosso, Michigan, in July of 2004.

The Polar Express Will Files (right) explains to Nora Flaherty of Michigan Public Radio that he

was using a mono and stereo microphone system with a large wind guard.

The Polar Express The sound of train wheels on rails is recorded with a boom mike by

Tim Nielsen.

Tim Nielsen Great print interview with

sound designer/recordist Tim Nielsen here!

Has been sound effects recordist or editor for such films as Avatar, There Will Be Blood, and Lord of the Rings (2001 & 2003)

The Polar Express Tim Nielsen uses a boom mike to record crossing guard bells, train wheels

rolling on rails, and the 1225’s chugging and whistle as it pulls a small train through town.

The Polar Express Will Files holds a microphone to

record the train coming to a stop.

The Polar Express Sound is recorded as the Pere Marquette

1225 rumbles by at top speed.

The 1225 has 12 sand hopper cars behind it to assure that the locomotive is laboring when its throttle is opened.

The Polar Express Tim Nielsen (left) and Will Files (right)

from Lucas Studio’s Skywalker Sound, Marin County, California, pose with Steam Railroading Institute Executive Director Dennis Braid (center) after recording was completed.

The Polar Express The sound team from Lucas’ Skywalker Sound

in California joined the Pere Marquette 1225 crew after sound recording was complete.

The Polar Express Clip of the arrival of The Polar

Express (4:51)

PAUSE

Article by Mark Richardson, posted on Pitchfork (2012): David Lynch's Eraserhead premiered in 1977 and enjoyed a lengthy run at midnight movie

houses in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London. It was a deeply personal film for Lynch. Purely in terms of atmosphere and tone, it introduced to the world his distinctive blend of surrealism, horror, and supremely dark humor. Shot in high contrast black and white, the film tells the bizarre tale of Henry Spencer (played by the late Jack Nance), an employee of a print factory who is "on vacation" in a nightmare world of soot-blackened skies and empty streets. His girlfriend Mary has given birth to a creature-- "They're not sure if it is a baby!"-- and it finds its way to Henry's care.

Though he's always been hesitant to talk too specifically about the meaning of his work, and of Eraserhead in particular, Lynch has said that the film, in terms of mood and setting, was based on his years in Philadelphia, where he lived in a run-down and dangerous part of the city while studying film. While there, his wife Peggy also gave birth to his daughter Jennifer, bringing into Lynch's world the anxiety of new fatherhood. Eraserhead was close to Lynch in another important way: He spent much of the five years of its production living on the movie's set at the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles, where Lynch had been granted a fellowship. He commandeered large portions of the grounds to make his film whenever he could raise the money and he chipped away at it over time.

For all its visual prowess and humor, the most powerful single aspect of Eraserhead may be its sound. Working with legendary sound designer Alan Splet, who would collaborate with Lynch until his death in 1994, the drones, creaks, hisses, and furnace blasts of the film's world are brought completely to life through sound alone.

Innovative Sound Design: The Classic Case of Eraserhead (D: David Lynch, 1977; Sound design by Alan Splet)

Interview with David Lynch by Bilge Ebiri, posted on Vulture (2014): BE: What about the sound of Eraserhead? Did you chase a sound that you had in your

head during production, or did the sound design come later?DL: It was a film that was inspired by the city of Philadelphia, and it’s an industrial world. It’s a smokestack-industry world. It’s factory-worker homes tucked away out of time. It has a certain feel, and the sounds have to marry to that feel, and [sound editor] Alan Splet and I just would work until we got the thing to feel correct.

Interview with David Lynch by Mark Richardson, posted on Pitchfork (2012): DL: For instance, on The Grandmother, we didn't have a reverb unit, so we made reverb by putting

speakers in the air ducts, and then re-recording them on the other end of the air duct-- doing that 10 times to get a real long reverb. It sounded really good, but it was just experimenting and getting sound to support the ideas. It just went like that: scene by scene, the ideas tell you what to shoot for, and the rest is an experiment.

DL: Well, we would set up sound experiments, sometimes in my living room. Al would bring his Nagra and microphone, and we would hit things and drag the microphone and just see what would happen, and then start altering that in any kind of way so that we could to get some mood that would support the scene.

DL: My favorite experiment was when we filled the bathtub with water and then we had a five gallon Sparkletts bottle-- glass-- and dropped a little microphone inside the bottle and moved it about the bathtub, maybe bang it a little bit on the side, scrape it on the side. And the microphone is picking up some kind of combination of everything that was coming in that little top of the bottle. It had very surreal beauty, and that sound went in the film. It was so much fun.

DL: Now, we have so many libraries and ways to get sound without having to actually make the original thing. And you can take any kind of sound and start going to work on it, and it can become ten trillion miles away from the original. But it's the same process. It's just that we, more often than not, made the original sounds and then went to work on it.

Interview with David Lynch by Mark Richardson, posted on Pitchfork (2012): MR: What was it about the Fats Waller organ music that connected it to the world of the

film for you?

DL: I don't know, exactly. It had a distant, haunting quality. And a little bit of innocence and a lightness-- not humor exactly-- and slam that with the mystery and the distant time. It was just magical. It married to the factory sounds and the character of Henry Spencer. He loves Fats Waller. I think it depends on what track he's listening to, but it has a melancholy and it has a romance. It has mystery. It just expanded Henry's world and his thinking.

MR: Do you imagine people listening to the album on its own, creating this space in their living room where they're entering the world of the film?

DL: Absolutely. When I was working on Eraserhead, we only worked at night. Sometimes I would be building a set or something in the daytime, but on the set, sitting in it or working in it, the so-called "real world" outside disappeared completely. I was in this factory world, and I could imagine the streets and the little diners and hardly anybody there from the little worker houses. There's a bar, and huge, giant, colossal factories. Huge smokestacks, building smoke, thick atmospheres. And I think, if you turn the lights down and play this [album] in full, a whole world can emerge in your head. And it will be really, really beautiful.

VIDEO: 2014 Interview -- David Lynch on the late Alan Splet (13:00)

A.V. Club essay by Mike D’Angelo with 3:00 clip (Henry arrives at Mary’s house for dinner)

Synesthesia Synesthesia is a type of sensory blending, whereby a stimulus perceived with one

sense may result in the activation of a different sense.

The most common sort of cross-modal sensing is apparently “colored hearing”—certain individuals (only a minority, according to Marks, 1978) quite literally see colors when they hear various sounds. The colors vary in a fashion analogous to the sounds; for instance, a “bright” sound, such as the blare of a trumpet, evokes a “bright” color, such as scarlet.

The existence of these analogous variations leads Marks and others to believe that the sensing of a stimulus can be reduced to a very small number of universal features.

The study of synesthesia, popular in the late 19th century and largely ignored in the mid-20th, has enjoyed a “second renaissance” of study in recent decades (Cytowic & Eagleman, 2009, p. 16; see also Baron-Cohen & Harrison, 1997; Cytowic, 1999).

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