Walter Murch

There's a fascinating interview here with Walter Murch,  concentrating mainly on his discovery that if you overlay an image looking up at the roof of the Pantheon in Rome the concentric circles on the ceiling line up almost exactly with a drawing of the solar system by Nicolaus Copernicus, a 16th century Mathematician and Astronomer who proposed that the sun rather than the earth was the centre of the universe.  Murch goes on to explain how the orbital ratios between the planets are also mathematically identical to intervals found between notes in music theory.  And it's not just our own solar system that this rule can be applied to, for instance, the distances between Jupiter's moons match the ratios between Ab, C, E and Bb.  David Byrne dedicates a chapter to this theory in 'How Music Works'.

When asked whether there are any similar patterns that can be found in film editing Murch says there probably are but thinks we are still searching for them, although he has noticed some patterns in regard to how many different camera angles are required to optimize an audiences enjoyment of a scene.  He very confidently states that you need 14 different camera setups per minute to cut a good fight scene and 4 per minute for a dialogue scene, any less and the action starts to drag, any more and there is too much information to take in and you lose the audience.

I was also interested to read his technique for recording sounds.  He records each sound isolated and then takes that recorded sound to a physical space that best matches the space where the sound is heard in the film.  He makes a new recording of the sound playing in this space to extract the maximum amount of reverb possible.  He then has 2 tracks to mix between for every spot sound in the film giving him complete control over the amount of reverb required to sit the sound in.