Jerry Bruckheimer likes ‘em big and loud. Movies, that is, and National Treasure: Book of Secrets is expected to meet expectations in terms of dB and SPL. But within that cacophonous jungle of sound is plenty of room for nuance, says George Watters II, supervising sound editor at Buena Vista Studios, where the film was edited.

Watters should know ‘ he’s been working the sound on Bruckheimer’s films since Flashdance in 1982 and has stayed with him as the volume ratcheted up through block- and ear-busters like Pearl Harbor and Pirates of the Caribbean.

“Sound has always been a big component of Jerry’s films,” Watters says, ticking off the scenes set on land, sea, air and asteroids (in Bruckheimer’s universe, you can hear explosions in outer space). Book of Secrets picks up where National Treasure left off, featuring Nicolas Cage and others from the original cast. But it’s more peripatetic; scenes shift from Washington, D.C. to London to Paris to a labyrinth of caves that are a central sound focus.

“The last few reels are gigantic, in terms of sound,” according to Watters, who says that creating the audio for cave interiors has similar challenges to doing it for outer space. “The caves are built on a sound stage. The production sound ‘ dialog and people walking on wood floors and things like that ‘ certainly would not work. But what does the inside of a cave sound like? Most people don’t know, unless you’re a miner. But I’ve never been on an asteroid, either. The mission is to put the audience in the middle of the picture, and here it was the middle of many large caves.”

The solution in this case was to take air movement sounds from the Buena Vista library and, using the time shifting feature on Digidesign Pro Tools, slow it down and crank it up, spiced with some distant moaning sounds. It’s a trick used on horror movies and Watters says the spooky result is what the crew was looking for to build tension in the cave scenes. Atop this sonic base they layered some Bruckheimer favorites, including the sounds of metal groaning and creaking, used before to simulate a submarine deep undersea. In some reels there are as many as 300 tracks of sound effects, but Watters stresses that they never distract from dialog and action. “It’s very subtle; [the sounds] are all there but we distributed a lot of it throughout the surrounds,” he explains.

(One not-so-subtle trick Watters let us in on was the use of a dynamite explosion sound effect used to underscore a huge stone door closing hard. “We took the dynamite element and clipped it in the middle and the tail, then added some large reverb to it,” he explains.)

Slowing a variety of sounds down was a motà­f for sound designer Shannon Mills, he drew from the vast Buena Vista libraries. That technique extends to the oceans of water that course through the caves in the film. Sometimes it drips and “plooks,” sometimes it gushes, but it’s always infused with a sinister baritone. “One of the reasons for that is that fast-moving water, like waterfalls, tend to be very hissy and high-end,” Watters says. “It’s an unpleasant frequency range and it tends to cover up dialog tracks, like white noise.” Bruckheimer has very specific feelings about sound competing with dialog. “He says when someone in the audience can’t hear a line, they turn to the person next to them to find out what was said and then two people miss the next line,” says Watters. So dialog mixer Kevin O’Connell and SFX predubbing mixers Chris Boyes and Beau Borders are careful to keep the dialog out front.

So they ratchet the water SFX frequency range down a few notches, but Watters tries to avoid using equalization to accomplish this. Instead, he looks for water sound elements that already have some of the frequency characteristics he’s looking for. Production mixer Peter Devlin’s job was to keep enough real water sounds away from the actor’s lines, and he largely succeeded, says Watters. Nonetheless, the use of real water running did occasionally overcome the dialog, necessitating looping sessions. “On Pearl Harbor, Peter had to record the dialog with incredible aircraft noise all around him, so he knows how to do it,” says Watters. “But even with radio microphones, you’re never going to get all of it in an action movie.”

There are other techniques to avoid the clash between sound effects and dialog, including a lighter touch with digital reverb, which is often what mixers reach for to add thunder and dimensionality to a scene. “One thing not to do is to put too much or any any reverb onto the effects elements in predub,” says Watters. “You don’t want to lock yourself in and find that it’s creating a conflict with the dialog during the final on the mix stage and then not be able to use as much of the effect as you wanted to.” In fact, the post-production crew will often send scenes with effects and dialog to the composer and music supervisor to give them a chance to write around that audio.

Book of Secrets is also notable for its workflow, which saw Buena Vista Studios, which did the audio editing, exchanging files regularly with Sony Pictures sound facilities, where the film was mixed on the Cary Grant theater stage. The Buena Vista facility itself is heavily networked, allowing editors to pull sound files from any library in the facility and from other Buena Vista facilities. Between Buena Vista and Sony, larger edited files were moved either on physical hard drives or via an FTP site. All major sound element types – SFX, dialog, Foley, etc. – were broken down further into subcategories, such as wind effects or animal noises, all elaborately databased and housed on separate drives. Sound editors could call up any sound file from its location via the database, but could also link back to Buena Vista for specific sounds.

It’s a very effective and efficient workflow, and the complex audio benefited from it. But that same effectiveness triggers some interesting questions about how such efficiency is affecting the culture of film-sound post.

“It raises expectations,” says Watters. “We can do things faster now, but you quickly reach a point where that speed is taken for granted and more speed is expected. What was fast [workflow] on the last film becomes normal on the next, and so on. You have the ability to make changes right up to and during the mix stage, and that’s a great thing since you’re not locked into anything. But at the same time, the films’ sound is way more complicated ‘ the mix stage looks more like a command center now, with as many as five or six workstation systems on the stage. It’s turned the mix stage into an editing studio. We are making better-sounding films, but it takes more time.”

Interestingly, film sound post is experiencing a phenomenon that music recording went through as digital became the norm there: the vastly increased number of tracks offers a huge number of options and possible combinations. However, many of those decisions are being put off further into the process, ending up with mixers having to manage enormous amounts of inputs and help make final decisions on tighter deadlines.

These sorts of problems come with digital’s turf, and there are ways to address them. On National Treasure 2, Watters sometimes sent low-res QuickTime versions of scenes to the director, composer and picture editors, in part to lock down some of the mix decisions before they got to the stage. “For the cave scenes, we did a quick two-track mix of 100 different sound elements so [director] Jon Turteltaub could hear what we were doing against picture and give us input back,” he recalls. “Schedules have gotten so hectic that quite often directors don’t have time for full spotting sessions anymore. Often the first temp dub becomes your spotting session.”

Adding to the issue is the increasing use of CGI elements in major films, which can similarly delay final visual decisions to the last minute.

If anything, this cultural shift has made the mix stage a more collaborative environment, Watters says. “People have to work together more closely than ever before,” he says. “But the result is, we’re making better-sounding pictures than ever before, too.”

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National Treasure: Book of Secrets is a globe-trotter, ranging from D.C. to London to Paris. Post-production sound has always been used as a subliminal way to cue to audiences to a location without making it obvious. One oft-used trick is the European emergency vehicle siren, comprised of two quickly alternating notes. But things change and you have to keep up on shifts often well out of your realm of expertise. When you hear a London fire truck’s siren in the film, it will sound remarkably similar to the ones we’re used to in the U.S.

“That’s because I found out that they switched to American-made sirens about two years ago,” says Watters. “[Director Jon Turteltaub] noticed it in the scene and asked me if I was sure I had the right sound. I told him, ‘Trust me, I checked.'”