Hollywood Sound Design and Moviesound Newsletter

<p>As film students and younger fans experience Big Hollywood Sound in Imax presentations and digital theaters many are also discovering action and adventure movies made well before they were born. There is a legacy to be enjoyed in the sound of these films: Blockbuster movies of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s are notable for the extraordinarily dramatic impact of their sound mixing and the way in which it could immerse audiences in a surrounding space. During this period a small group of sound professionals in Hollywood wrote and published a critical journal about the craftsmanship new technology and changing aesthetics that excited conversation in their community. Their work has been edited and compiled here for the first time.</p><p></p><p>David Stone is a sound editor a veteran of roughly 100 Hollywood feature films such as <i>Gremlins Top Gun Die Hard Speed</i> and <i>Ocean’s 11</i>. He was a Supervising Sound Editor for projects as varied as <i>Predator Edward Scissorhands Beauty and the Beast Batman Returns City Slickers 2 </i>and<i> Dolores Claiborne</i>. He has collected <i>Golden Reel</i> awards for Best Sound Editing five times and won the 1992 Academy Award® for best Sound Effects Editing for his supervising work on <i>Bram Stoker’s Dracula</i>. In 2015 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the <i>San Luis Obispo Jewish Film Festival</i> in California. Stone is now a Professor and former Chair of Sound Design at Savannah College of Art and Design. Between 1989 and 1994 he was the editor of <i>Moviesound Newsletter</i> which was published by Vanessa Ament. </p><p></p><p>Dr. Vanessa Theme Ament is the author of <i>The Foley Grail </i>and a contributor to <i>Sound: Dialogue Music and Effects </i>(the Silver Screen Series). She is on the steering committee for <i>Cinesonika</i> an international film festival and conference. A veteran Foley artist sound editor and voice actor from Los Angeles she also writes and sings jazz and is a member of the American Federation of Musicians SAG-AFTRA Actors Equity and the Editors Guild. She worked on <i>Die Hard</i> <i>sex lies and videotape</i> <i>Platoon</i> <i>Predator</i> <i>Edward Scissorhands</i> <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> <i>Noises Off</i> and <i>A Goofy Movie </i>and many other films. Dr. Ament received her Ph.D. in Communication in the area of Moving Image Studies from Georgia State University in Atlanta and is presently the Edmund F. and Virginia B. Ball Endowed Chair Professor of Telecommunications at Ball State University in Muncie Indiana.</p><p></p>