The TICKET
Thursday, June 19, 1997

It sounds like Warren man has Batman down cold

By ANDY GRAY
Tribune Chronicle

If the crunch in Mr. Freeze's steps sounds familiar in the new movie "Batman & Robin,'' that's because it was recorded nearby. Warren composer and sound effects designer Gary Boggess was contracted by the film's sound supervisor Bruce Stambler (a 1996 Oscar winner for his work on ``The Ghost and the Darkness'') to record ice and snow sounds for the big-budget summer film that opens Friday.

Boggess worked with Stambler on the HBO film "Barbarians at the Gate'' when Boggess relocated to California in 1992-93 to work as an associate sound editor at Electric Melody Studios in Santa Monica.

"He called about the first week of March and said they needed sound effects for ice,'' Boggess said. "I couldn't supply them anything because everything was melted around here.''

Then he got a call from a cousin in Conneautville, Pa., who said they still had snow. So Boggess packed up his equipment and headed to the northwest Pennsylvania city.

"I got there at 2:30 in the morning,'' he said. ``I could only record for about 45 minutes at a time because the batteries kept freezing and running down in the cold.''

Without a script to work from, Boggess just started capturing as many ice-related sounds as he could imagine. "They had about three inches of snow,'' he said. "Everything had started to melt and then froze over again. There were these huge areas of melted snow frozen in sheets." "I would break off these sheets of ice and throw them down the snowbanks. They would break as they slid down the hill and I would record them. I did all kinds of debris sounds and lots of walking. I had a variety of surfaces to walk on. I also did body falls.  I was falling into snowbanks and rolling down hills.''

Many moviegoers probably just assume they had a microphone on during filming and that's where the sounds originated. The reality is that sound effects team members put in nearly every noise one hears in a movie, from the simplest footsteps to those theater-shaking explosions.

Boggess had about two hours of ice sounds after he edited the tapes down, and those tapes were used by the sound effects crew in the finished film. Mr. Freeze, the villain played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, uses a gun to freeze many of his victims and lives in an icy chamber.

In addition to his sound effects work, Boggess is a composer who's written commercial jingles, the original score for the multi-media dance work "SegWay'' that premiered last year in Chicago and the music that accompanies the fireworks display at Warren's New Year's Eve celebration Opening Night.

He will serve as music composer, sound effects designer and sound editor on "The Master Mechanic,'' the upcoming movie from Continental Film Group in Sharon, Pa.

*****
Copyright 1997 by The Tribune Chronicle.

Download the above article by Andy Gray: Freeze.txt

Arnold Schwarzenegger is Mr. Freeze in the feature film
"Batman and Robin."
Released in June 20, 1997

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