07/15/2019
From an interview with Director Todd Douglas Miller for Apollo 11 in Filmmaker Magazine:
“The work Eric Milano did on the sound mix—usually you have 12 guys work on this stuff. We worked on it so long that Eric did everything himself—all the foley, everything.
Filmmaker: What were the rules for foley in terms of reconstructing atmosphere, especially within mission control? Obviously, you had to construct some of that. I’m not sure if you could only draw upon archival or if you were going to put a little library tone in there or what.
Miller: Our rule was, if we didn’t have reference for it, we weren’t going to create it. We were very fortunate early on. Although we were flying under the radar, the space community knew about us, so a lot of the older engineers that were around during the Apollo days were giving us materials from everywhere—cassette tapes, 8-millimeter recordings from the launch that day that were poorly recorded, just because of the limitations of the time, but they were great for reference. So, if we had a helicopter, for instance, we needed to know the exact helicopter sounds. So we went and grabbed that. Luckily, the Smithsonian has been a great partner on the film. The IMAX at National Air and Space in [Washington,] D.C., we used that as our testing theater.
I always wanted to know exactly what the sound of the Saturn V rocket sounded like. I drove the team nuts, I’m sure, but we needed to nail it. It’s just not a low sound. There’s this high popcorn sound that happens, and everybody talks about. You could hear it through some of the TV broadcasts, but we found actual recordings. I wanted to know what it sounded like in every single space: What did it sound like two miles away? What did it sound like when you were in the VIP stand? And what’d it sound like when you were in a helicopter, because we had shots of it taking off from a helicopter? All those things combined were the guidelines that we gave Eric. It was basically all him. Sounds in mission control, sounds in the firing room, we needed to know what those computers sounded like. Those analog computers and IBMs, we got them and integrated them into the film. There’s a shot in there—everybody thinks it’s a dolly shot. That was Theo Kamecke, the director of Moonwalk One, who was the only civilian in the firing room. He actually used a wheelchair as a dolly. So, we wanted to hear the sound of the wheelchair. What did a wheelchair sound like back then? Well, let’s get a ’60s wheelchair”
Full interview here: https://filmmakermagazine.com/107173-moonshot-todd-douglas-miller-on-apollo-11/#.XS0CVSWxWaM
Todd Douglas Miller’s Apollo 11, which premiered at this year’s Sundance, originated from the simple idea of using archival footage to revisit, in time for its 50th anniversary, the first moon landing. For those who’ve grown up watching the same images trotted out over and over—Neil Armstron...