Myrtle Beach native wrangles sound, award nominations

Whatever sounds good in a movie really is music to Will Files’ ears, in a world of ways.

The Myrtle Beach native assisted as one of two supervising sound editors in “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” which is up for honors in the 62nd annual Motion Picture Sound Editors Golden Reel Awards ( mpse.org) Sunday evening in Los Angeles.

Files, a professional sound designer, said the science fiction drama, released in July by Chernin Entertainment, qualified in three categories, a feat he called “pretty rare” for one production. He summarized each:

Files is named in the description for the movie’s first two entries with fellow sound editor Douglas Murray.

Remembering his path to earning his filmmaking degree from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, N.C., Files spoke of meeting “one of my sound heroes,” Randy Thom of Skywalker Sound, with whom he was encouraged to touch base after graduation. After moving to California’s Bay Area, Files began an internship with Thom in 2002, “and I managed to work my way up from there.”

Adding in the sound

In immersing himself in his art, Files said the aim centers on making sound so it “naturally feels like part of the movie.”

“Seventy-five percent of what you hear in a movie,” he said, “is added sound effects or added music, and in many cases, added dialogue.”

The nature of how a movie viewer processes sound vs. pictures differs, Files said.

“Sound has a way of sneaking into the side of your brain and communicating with you on an emotional level,” he said, eager to contribute on each production, “to move and affect the audience.”

In a major movie, where workdays can stretch to 16 hours, the crew putting together sound might number from six to 40, including engineers and assistants, Files said, and sound work for this latest “Apes” prequel spanned nine months, with a crew that reached 30 “at its widest point.”

For smaller productions, such as works screened in the annual Sundance Film Festival in Utah, Files said he’s been the lone sound designer or among a team of three or four.

Genrewise, Files said, “it’s fun no matter what it is.”

“Small films have their own unique challenges just because of budgeting and scheduling,” he said. “You learn things when working on little movies that you use in big movies. It’s always changing and challenging.”

Acting on idea in flight

The access and convenience with the evolution of technology also have helped, Files said, for a home studio would have taken “a million dollars’ worth of equipment” not that long ago.

“I literally have made sounds movies while on an airplane,” he said. “I made a sound for a ‘Star Trek’ film while I was in a plane to China, and it ended up in the movie. Anywhere the creativity strikes, as long as you have a laptop and good headphones.”

The average quality of film soundtracks “has gone up quite a bit in the last 15 years,” he said, a combination of technology and “the industry maturing a bit.”

Files said back in the 1950s and ’60s, “you mostly had mono soundtracks” that were low fidelity, “very tinny,” and with only one channel, but Dolby sound today, with 64 channels, lets a sound designer “make it sound like an elephant is running through the room.”

With a move to Los Angeles a couple of years ago, Files said he likes being “kind of a freelancer” in sound design, especially because he fills his free time by traveling.

“You have to be comfortable with the idea of not having a lot of sure things,” he said, “and being a bit of a gypsy. You don’t ever know what you’re going to be doing a year from now. You get pockets of time off, for a week or two, or it might be a month. I figure out where I can go and what’s warm at this time of year.”

Movies that Files most appreciates as a viewer, with an inevitable extra ear by vocation, include “Apocalypse Now,” because of the effect of hearing Martin Sheen scenes “through his head.”

“All the ‘Star Wars’ films” represent gold for Files, especially “that very first one,” from 1977, with its “innovative, brilliant sound.”

“Almost anyone today can make the sounds of R2D2 or Chewbacca,” Files said of instant identification among fans, “but sound engineers had to come up with those sounds for that world. Now you hear that one character’s sound, and you know exactly whose it is.”

Ambition born at Dad’s office

Files, who graduated from Horry County Schools’ Academy for the Arts, Science and Technology program and Myrtle Beach High School in 1998, said that time, when friends knew him as William, “seems like forever ago.”

One middle school teacher, Jim Cannone, left an imprint on Files, who said he “basically let us run our own video cameras and edit little segments together, and we used very basic equipment to enhance our creativity with video.”

Janet Files thought back to when she first saw the sparkle in her son’s eye that evolved into his profession, at husband Bill Files’ workplace, WKZQ-FM in Myrtle Beach.

Seeing her son don headphones at age 2, Janet Files never forgot that “euphoric expression.” With his father as an engineer, “the behind the scenes” guy at the station, young Will, she said, “saw all the technology that went into putting sound into radio.”

In a family of four children, they took pictures “of everything,” Janet Files said, so Will Files’ fondness to film home movies fit right in, and that led to a debut movie project with friends after school, about a little guinea pig, filmed in the neighborhood and using a giveaway toy from a Burger King meal.

“Different things would go missing across the house that had to be used as props,” Janet Files said.

She likes how the now larger arts academy, with its own campus, still gives a direction for “artistic” and tech-driven youth to apply themselves, as she saw with her son.

“As soon as the new technology was there, he was ready and on it,” Janet Files said, citing other talents gained, such as lighting in stage productions and with photography for the school’s “first yearbook.”

Combining a young verve for computers and technology with being collaborative and genial with people has translated to vital skills in Will Files’ work today, his mom said.

Also with a home in Asheville, N.C., he said he returns to the Carolinas “once or twice a year.”

Asked what slice of life for which Files longs from the Grand Strand, he cued up his appetite.

“I think what I miss the most is chicken bog,” he said. “No one in California even knows what it is.”

This story was originally published February 11, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Myrtle Beach native wrangles sound, award nominations."