Those looking forward to driving air taxis in 25th-century New York may be surprised to learn that they sound not so very different from the earthbound versions of today. At least that's the scenario in director Luc Besson's futuristic movie The Fifth Element, starring Bruce Willis as a cabbie who saves the world. Supervising sound editor Mark A. Mangini says that the key to most of the technology in the film, which was released this month by Columbia Pictures, is its connection to a 20th-century counterpart.

"Visually, all of the vehicles are very reminiscent of internal combustion automobiles, except that they don't have wheels and they hover," says Mangini, a partner with Richard L. Anderson in the North Hollywood-based company Weddington Prods. "I'd pick a section like the air taxi chase sequence, go off and make my sounds, and bring them back to Luc. He'd say, `I like this aspect of the sound, but I don't like the fact that it has this air whooshing noise, because I don't think there's any air involved in the technology of a car hovering. I want it to be more of a hum or a buzz.'"

 Mangini ended up using a Porsche V8 engine, sampling representative sections with "the throatiest, gurgliest sort of exhaust pipe feel." On top of this, the sound editor added servo motors and synthetic elements to suggest hovering technology and an overall futuristic feel; these were "pitch-tracked" along with the engine sounds. "We played that for Luc," says Mangini, "and he said, `You're getting close, but it has a shift in it, and we don't have a shifter in this vehicle.' So we had to go back and resample the engine component, removing the shifting element. We ended up finding a nice throaty idle, and created a more constant acceleration, like the accelerator lever on a boat."

 What made this process more complicated was that the images that were to accompany the sounds were in a crude early form. "I started last August before they had any visuals on the air taxi," says Mangini. "They had stills of the artist's rendering, and preliminary motion tests with no texture mapping from Digital Domain, who created all the digital effects. So it was a constant process of evolution as shots would come in--you'd say, `Oh, I see, that's how the car slops.' I couldn't create a sound, put it on a shelf, and go on to the next thing."

 Mangini also had to design sounds for four different types of creatures in the film, most prominently the evil Mangalors. "The Mangalors were pretty easy, because they were the bad guys," he says. "You have a model that you can't deviate too much from, which is that bad guys always sound deeper and gravellier than good guys. Bad guys cannot have a Michael Jackson voice; they can't sound like Pee Wee Herman. I've tried to sell it, but it doesn't fly, it will never, ever work. It will have to be a completely different society and culture before that will happen in a movie."

 The Mangalors speak both English and their own language, which Mangini defines as "grunts and groans, basically." The first step was to cast voices for the English part of their speech, he says. "If what we were going to do when they spoke English didn't work with the other part, we couldn't go any further. So I had to get an English voice that worked, then attempt to process it and make it sound like it would integrate with what they would sound like when they didn't speak English. If they didn't speak English, I would have just gone full blast into a weird creature voice; I could have done anything."

 When properly throaty voices were cast, "we then applied animal sounds, and modified and filtered them, so when they speak English, you hear what sounds like an animal but it's actually a human voice," the sound editor explains. "Once we had that, we stripped away the English and said, `OK, that's what Mangalor sounds like when there's no English.'"

 Mangini, who trained as a sound editor on cartoons at Hanna Barbera, and whose credits range from Gremlins to Disney animated features like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King, says Weddington Prods. prides itself on recording everything fresh on a film. "With a caveat," he adds: "No budget is big enough to record and create everything from scratch, so you have to have a library to fall back on. We use commercial libraries as a last resort. Years ago, my partner and I began recording a very modern sound effects library on stereo Nagras. As soon as DAT recorders became available, we bought some of the first in the country, and we were out in the field recording digitally. So we built up a vast, custom, high-quality sound effects library."

 The company is now almost totally in the digital domain, a gradual process of conversion that has taken place over the past seven or eight years. Sound design equipment includes synthesizers, samplers, hard-disk editors, and electronic outboard processing gear. Editing is accomplished with Pro Tools 2 hardware, with various software plug-ins and equalizers like Night Technologies' EQ3.

 During The Fifth Element editing process, Mangini was supervising a crew of editors, including David Yewdall, Julia Evershade, David A. Whittaker, Geoffrey G. Rubay, Foley editors Curt Schulkey and Aaron Glascock, and ADR editor Solange S. Schwalbe. The delegation of duties was primarily "vertical," with an individual editor assigned specific reels, and taking responsibility for all effects within those reels. This is opposed to the more common practice of "horizontal" editing, in which editors will be delegated certain types of effects throughout an entire film.

 Mangini's next project is The Conspiracy Theory, a Richard Donner thriller starring Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts. It's a realistic movie, which the sound editor says is harder for him. "You can't trick anybody," he explains. "I mean, who says that's not what a Mangalor sounds like? It's what I say it sounds like."

TCI 05/97

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