, takes place on a battleship in the chill of a North Atlantic winter. Tom Hanks wrote the screenplay and stars in the film about a captain whose ship comes under attack by German U-boats as it crosses what is known as the black pit of the ocean — an area not covered by anti-submarine aircraft.
Minkler explains the layers of sound that went into the sequence, in which Hank’s Captain Ernest Krause is shouting out commands to his crew. “Music has to be playing to place the action and the suspense,” he says. “There are the sound effects with the engines, the high seas, the explosions coming from both sides — and it’s a short sequence.”
He also watched WWII clips of the weapons in action and the workings of the ship itself. Though what he saw gave him a sense of the battle, what he heard wasn’t cinema-ready. “They sounded old and not as dramatic,” he says. Still, he and Shaw wanted the result to register as authentic. To create their aural tapestry they used existing libraries of the sounds of ships at war. Adds Shaw: “We weren’t trying to make a Hollywood gun sound; we were trying to create the accurate sound of those guns.
...most of which wasn’t noticed cos we all watched it at home (if at all)