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Sound designer and sound effects editor Frank Edward Warner, who won an Oscar for his sound edit­ing work on “Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind,” died of nat­ural causes in Ari­zona, on August 31. He was 85.

Warner said that “sound is like music that gives us the emo­tion that the writer intended.”

In 1966, while work­ing with Stan­ley Kubrick on the film “Sparta­cus,” he real­ized that film was truly an art form and that sound effects made a def­in­ite con­tri­bu­tion. “One of my best notes within my com­pos­i­tions was the absence of sound, which was very dra­matic,” he said. “I accom­plished more with silence than with actual sound. The greatest com­pli­ment I received about my work was when someone, after view­ing a film, asked me what I did. It was so nat­ural that the per­son was not even aware of the sound effects.”

More than 60 films included “Har­old and Maude”, “Sham­poo”, “Paper Moon”, “King of Com­edy”, “Taxi Driver”, “Being There”, the Rocky fran­chise, “Breath­less”, “Com­ing Home” and “Raging Bull”.

In 1978, Warner received an Academy Award for the sound effects on Steven Spiel­berg’s “Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind.”

For the Mother Ship sound, I made up 31 dif­fer­ent sounds includ­ing hay­balers (slowed and reversed), trucks, trains, mos­qui­toes, metal and wood twists, squad­rons of planes, etc. All were treated to remove their source and to move this tre­mend­ous image of a big, heavy liv­ing but harm­less mass.”

Warner’s sound lib­rary con­sisted of a mil­lion and a half feet of sounds, cata­logued and cross-indexed. In 1988 he won a life­time achieve­ment award from the Motion Pic­ture Sound Editors.

via Vari­ety

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