BURBANK EFFECTS FIRM MAKING ITS PROSPECTS SOUND AS A DOLLAR.

Byline: Dave McNary Staff Writer

In an anonymous two-story building in an industrial neighborhood, three dozen engineers struggle every day to remove life's distractions from Hollywood movies.

SoundStorm, along with Hollywood-based Soundelux and George Lucas' Skywalker Sound in San Rafael, have been the leading players in the ultra-competitive field of movie ``sound design'' and editing for more than a decade. But achieving the seamless integration of sound and story has become a far more complex task as digital sound makes it easier to recognize audio glitches emanating from the big screen.

``In theaters, everything that's been shot on film is going to be magnified - camera noise, dry mouth, clicks, air conditioning,'' said Charles Meister, chief executive officer of Burbank-based SoundStorm. ``Our job is to try to keep the audience in the story as much as possible. Clicks and pops take them out of it.'' Accomplishing that sounds simple but is painstaking.

Even though much of the process takes advantage of digital technology, often taking months of work for a single feature, that work usually does not start until after the shooting on a film has stopped.

``Except on big-budget films, we are usually not on the set; we provide the illusion that we were,'' Meister noted.

SoundStorm, which is owned by half a dozen of its executives, is not standing still. Its owners decided earlier this year that they needed to start changing direction amid Hollywood's increasing use of digital technology.

SoundStorm hired Meister, who had been president of Soundelux for six years, in June with the specific goal to ``diversify the company's services and products'' into such areas as theme parks, trailers, commercials and the Internet.

``What it comes down to is moving data and eventually, we'll move it over fiber-optics,'' Meister said. ``Everything is going to change and it's all going to need audio. The industry is very cyclical and tricky but all these new areas can benefit from high-quality sound.''

That means going after not only the high-profile studio projects but the less visible titles.

``I recently shot a scary movie called `Everything Put Together,' where sound design is pretty important because it adds a third dimension to the film with noises in the background that really add to the texture,'' said Marc Forster, the film's producer.

``I thought the SoundStorm people were really wonderful about trying to offer services that were within my budget but still with high technical standards,'' said Forster, who hopes to sell the movie at the Sundance Film Festival. ``What I really liked is they treated my film the same as they would have if it had been from a name producer.''

The 40-member SoundStorm team has racked up four Academy sound editing nominations and one victory, for 1996's ``The Ghost and the Darkness,'' with its re-creation of turn-of-the-century life on the African frontier. In 1993's Oscar-nominated ``The Fugitive,'' SoundStorm used more than 200 different soundtracks for the famous train-crash scene.

It's a business that combines a massive library of more than 7,000 separate sounds with precision location recordings. Some of the more notable: a Puerto Rican bat cave for ``Batman Forever,'' a Mississippi swamp in ``A Time to Kill'' and the most desolate areas of California's high desert for the upcoming ``Three Kings.''

``Every film is an opportunity to do something unique,'' Meister said.

For ``Three Kings,'' a Warner Bros. release set at the end of the Gulf War, SoundStorm engineers went to the barren stretches of the northern Mojave Desert near Acton and California City to re-create sounds of troops operating in the Kuwaiti and Iraqi wilderness.

``We picked those areas because you can record there with very little other sound,'' Meister said. ``Deserts are great places for recording the sounds of vehicles and for blowing stuff up.''

But what SoundStorm does is far more complex than going out to a sand pit with tape recorders and setting off some dynamite. ``I think they're very good at making very small choices to give a film a natural look and feel,'' said Peter Freedman, who recently completed directing an offbeat comedy called ``Bad Dog,'' about a man who walks dogs for a living in New York City.

``I shot very quickly and cheaply, often without synchronized sound, so a lot of what you hear had to be created in post-production - scenes in the vet's office, cats howling, the creaking of a door,'' said Freedman, who is seeking a distributor. ``The thing that was most impressive was what (SoundStorm) was able to do - create sound with a sense of humor, which I think is quite rare.''

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PHOTO (color) SoundStorm CEO Charles P. Meister, with part of his company's 7,000 hours of sound effects.

John McCoy/Staff Photographer