Oscar-winning film for Best Sound Editing, ‘American Sniper’, is known for its high-packed action scenes filled with gunfire and war. However, these sounds of gunfire were not easy to create. Sound supervisors Alan Robert Murray and Bub Asman were responsible for delivering the sounds to the director, Clint Eastwood. They made sure to deliver a very realistic documentary approach to the way they designed their sound which means there is very little music.
Alan, who is very detailed, made sure that every weapon in the film had its own unique sound. He did this by recording the sounds of each and every weapon that made an appearance in the film and recorded them in the exact same location on set as they appeared in the film. This meant firing off blanks on top of the highest buildings at Warner Bros. and recording the vehicles and Humvees on the Iraq set in Blue Cloud Ranch. The weapons included rifles, automatic weapons, and even 50-caliber guns on the Humvees. One of the hardest challenges they faced was actually trying to represent the sniper’s silencer effectively, so Alan and his team had to exaggerate the sound of the sniper. If they had not done this, it wouldn’t have stood out against the other gunfire. So, they used explosives inside pipes with the ends pinched which created a wide range of useable sounds. As Alan says, “We had to make the silenced guns powerful and deadly, yet be silenced”. And once Alan and his sound mixing team gathered all the sounds of the guns, they then layered the sounds of the ambient noises, such as other vehicles, explosions, and guard dogs as well as the dialogue spoken by the actors in the film.
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The sound team also had to convey Kyle’s PTSD to the audience by alternating between Kyle in Iraq and Kyle at home with his family so the dynamic changes throughout the film. For example, the sound team gathered sounds of tanks, gunfire, and just overall war and was able to represent Kyle's psychological state from the flashbacks and PTSD, which were then transferred to his experience in Iraq, which is all represented solely by sound.
As for the minimal music used in the film, it is strategically placed in order to convey certain emotions to the audience. For example, the song that was played at the end of the movie was martial music that mourned the loss of the soldier, Chris Kyle. Martial music is music played in the military that contains bugle calls, fanfare, and drum cadences. This particular song was perfect for this funeral scene because not only does this genre of music muster emotion, but this scene also elevates the audience’s emotions even more because of the absence of music throughout the film.
So, overall, the film ‘American Sniper’ is known for its iconic sound and the way it transports you into a different place, and in this case, war. Alan Robert Murray, Bub Asman, and their team did a phenomenal job at conveying the real-life atmosphere of the tense setting of war and suffering.
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