SOUND DESIGNER

REN KLYCE

REN KLYCE
American (born in Japan) sound designer, effect
supervisor and supervising sound editor with 5
nominations for Oscar. He studied Electronic Music at
UC Santa Cruz.
During the summer job where he was working as an art
assistant for George Lucas at animated comedy Twice
Upon a Time he met director David Fincher. They
became fiends and now their still ongoing more than 20
years long partnership is one of most acclaimed
collaborations in the modern film sound community.
Ren has been working on movies such as:

Fight Club
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Gone Girls
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Zodiac
Inside Out
Alice Through the Looking Glass

FIGHT CLUB
The Sound of a punch
Ren Klyce and director David Fincher had specific vision
how the sound should be like. They didnt wanted to create
the sound in conventional way and then reusing the same
sound for every hit.

The punch sounds

(hit the youtube button)

They wanted it to be lifelike.

Therefore Ren and his crew were experimenting a lot and
created extensive sound library by using for example:
chicken carcasses stuffed with walnuts and shattering
them with baseball bats
Hitting the table with pigs feet
The director and sound designer of the movie care about
Foley much more than any other film directors. They are
paying attention even to those little sounds that viewers
usually wont notice as they are watching the movie. They
put a lot of effort into recording the sounds in a proper
acoustical space and experimenting with a new surrealistic
sounds to create real lifelike sounds.

Ren about Fight Club

(hit the youtube button)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The sound of a quiet apartment
Ren Klyce sees sound design as the supporting partner to the
image.
People usually remember the loudest parts of the movie.
Whereas the real challenge for sound designers and editors are
those quiet scenes the viewer dont even has to notice any
sounds. These scenes are difficult to rhythm and create the
right spacing between dialogues.
The scene after Lisabeth came with a girl to her quiet
apartment after night in a loud club and they woke up on
Michaels knocking is perfect example.
The director David Fincher wanted to make audience felt like
we were in Lisabeths environment with a sense of poverty and
desperation. So the sound designer and his crew built the
sound in a several ways. In vertical and horizontal frequencies.
Vertical frequencies are those low tones that viewer wont
usually even notice (a distant television, low rumble of the city
behind the thin walls, loud air-conditioning). Horizontal
frequencies are higher tones that happen in sequences
(motorbike going by, sirens in the distance, the floor creak, the
dripping of the bathroom faucet).

The quiet scene

(hit the youtube button)

INSIDE OUT
The sound of the mind world
After the Ren Klyce was working on movies like Seven,
Fight club or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, he
took another challenging place as a sound designer in a
Disney animated movie Inside out.
It was huge difference for a several reasons. One of them
was that Disney producers are involving the sound
designers in very early stages.
The main difference was that for this movie Ren and the
sound crew had to create sounds for the world that
doesnt exist.
They needed to figure out noises and sounds for place
that no one have ever been before.
Theyve ended up using and trying out all kinds of
different types of glass to create the sound of memories
sitting and crashing into each other on the shelfs.
For the sound of ambience of the mind world they
recorded crabs walking in the sand.

The making of Inside Out

(hit the youtube button)

Bibliography:
Albrechtsen, Peter (2014) Invasive Insects and Immersive Sonics Ren Klyce on the
Sound of Gone Girl http://designingsound.org/2014/11/invasive-insects-and-immersivesonics-ren-klyce-on-the-sound-of-gone-girl/ (Accessed on 14 January 17)
Desowitz, Bill (2015) Immersed in Movies: Ren Klyce Talks Inside OutSound Design
http://www.indiewire.com/2015/12/immersed-in-movies-ren-klyce-talks-inside-out-sounddesign-122441/ (Accessed on 14 January 17)
Fera, Rae Ann (2012) Do you really know what sound design is? One of the Best Dragon
Tattoos Ren Klyce breaks it down https://www.fastcocreate.com/1679966/do-you-reallyknow-what-sound-design-is-one-of-the-best-dragon-tattoos-ren-klyce-breaks-it-d (Accessed
on 14 January 17)
Film Sound, The Sparing Partners http://filmsound.org/studiosound/pp_fightclub.html
(Accessed on 14 January 17)
Restuccio, Nicholas (2011) Sound designer Ren Klyce talks Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
http://www.postmagazine.com/Press-Center/Daily-News/2011/Sound-designer-Ren-Klycetalks-Girl-With-the-Dra.aspx (Accessed on 14 January 17)
Soundworks collection, The Sound of Inside Out http://www.slashfilm.com/the-sound-ofinside-out/ (Accessed on 14 January 17)
University of California Santa Cruz, The Sound designer UCSC Alum Ren Klyce, makes all
the right noises http://arts.ucsc.edu/features/featured-alum/sound-designer-and-ucsc-alumren-klyce-makes-all-right-noises (Accessed on 14 January 17)