“This was a movie with no feet, no footsteps and no traditional foley,” says Rydstrom. “So one of the basic things we had to do was make a believable movement track for all the various fish, and give each of them their own character. One of my favorite sounds was the one we came up with for Nemo’s damaged fin. It has a little flutter almost like a wing flap. I created a very simple flapping sound with a paper towel. There’s almost a hummingbird quality to it. Marlin propels himself with tail flaps so he sounds a bit neurotic. For him, we basically used the sound of the fish character in the Pixar short “Knick Knack.” Dory makes more of a smooth cutting sound as she moves through the water. She’s just going through life having a good time. We tried every trick in the book to differentiate the main characters with sound.
“For the sharks, I used a device where I could modulate real sounds with my voice,” continues Rydstrom. “I took real water sounds of various types and growled into a microphone so that my vocal characteristics would shape the river-gurgle sound or whatever we happened to be using. This gave a deep scary feeling to their water movement. If you listen carefully during the shark chase, the water sounds are saying ‘Nemo.’ It’s kind of my own subliminal Beatles trick.
“One of the things we discovered early on was that things actually recorded underwater are boring, so we ended up manufacturing a lot of the sounds. We did go to a pet store with a lot of aquariums and stuck our mikes in the tanks and moved them through the water. For the fish tank in the film we wanted a contrast with the wide-open ocean. Occasionally, you hear weird, cheesy filter buzzes, goofy bubbles and things that happen in real aquariums.”
Rydstrom recorded sounds in the ocean, in jacuzzis and even in a coastal cave to get the sound of water sloshing and crashing. The latter ended up being used to approximate the inside of a whale. The sound of Marlin and Dory bouncing on jellyfish proved to be a bit elusive. Rydstrom finally got the desired effect when he bounced his finger on a hot water bottle to get the nice little muted, watery “glug” sound he wanted.
In a true example of suffering for one’s art, Rydstrom’s assistant, Dee, even recorded her own visit to the dentist. The brutal dental drill heard in “Finding Nemo” is actually Dee getting a filling done.
According to John Lasseter, “Gary Rydstrom has done the sound design on every one of our films since ‘Luxo Jr.’ and he’s always taught me how the sound can help our films and help the worlds in our films to be more believable to the audience. And on ‘Finding Nemo,’ Gary has done some of his very best work. Water swishes can get repetitive, but he worked so hard to make it very special. He is a great collaborator and he always adds so much to our films.”
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