Sound design - (Blog Post 15)
A blog post by: Kelsey Reid
Sound design is also another important element to this film, being that much of the soundtrack is made up out of the diegetic sounds of the mind sequence. During pre-production, Dan, who took on the role of sound recordist, recorded various different Foley sounds e.g. head banging, chains clattering and being pulled tort and the sound of the leather jacket rustling. This was to give us an idea of the different diegetic sounds we had to play with later in post-production.
Sound design is also another important element to this film, being that much of the soundtrack is made up out of the diegetic sounds of the mind sequence. During pre-production, Dan, who took on the role of sound recordist, recorded various different Foley sounds e.g. head banging, chains clattering and being pulled tort and the sound of the leather jacket rustling. This was to give us an idea of the different diegetic sounds we had to play with later in post-production.
One of the sounds we also intended to use to make up our soundtrack was the faint whisperings of the character Leonardo asking for a glass of water in Spanish. It’s stated that the sound of a voice can act “as another body in the film… acting as a feeling, a texture or even a nostalgic presence” (Guy, 2016). Similarly, the use of this sound adds another layer to our soundtrack, by symbolically giving context to Leonardo’s internal struggle. The decision to have the whisperings spoken in Spanish rather than in English gives the piece a more authentic feel because Leonardo is a native Spanish speaking person. In addition, it will hopefully put the English-speaking audience at a place of subtle unease as they don’t know exactly what is being said. Therefore, they are feeling a similar emotion to Leonardo, who is also feeling uneasy but because of his struggle to communicate to the café worker. In addition, the use of the whispers adds another layer of texture to the soundtrack for us to experiment with. Without the whispers the soundtrack would appear fairly empty.
During filming we got Louis (who acted out Leonardo) to repeat his sentences in Spanish, starting from gentle whispers to loud shouts, so that we could capture a variety of tones to experiment with in sound design. His shouts might be quite useful to use as we build up to the climax of the mind sequence.
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| Amauros (2014) |
As advised by our tutor, we watched Amauros (2014) due to its similar concept to our own film. Much like our opening sequence, this film consists of a black screen only, subtitles and diegetic sounds. This screen dance film shows just how important diegetic sounds are as a storytelling device because through this and the subtitles which tells us what is happening on the stage, the audience are almost able to visualise the dancers in their own minds. Therefore, to create a similar effect we will exaggerate our use of diegetic sounds, especially as we build up to the climax where we can also start layering these sounds on top of one another to create a chaotic feel.
Foley
Once we were close to a picture-lock, we began working on building up the soundtrack for the film. Much of the foley had to be re-recorded so that we could exactly match the sounds of Leonardo’s movements in the mind sequence. We put up the film on my laptop screen and and then mimicked the movements of Louis to match the sounds from the straight-jacket, his footsteps and the sounds of the chains rustling.
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| Alicia and I in the studio at EP working on Foley |
Once we had captured all the foley, we used the software ‘ProTools’ to sync up all the sounds and then started experimenting with layering them on top of one another.
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| Our final sound design timeline |
Additional references:
Amauros. 2014. Directed by: Cie Nicole Seiler. Accessed on: 04 May 2019. URL: https://vimeo.com/87001114
Guy, P. 2016.Screendance as a Question: All This Can Happenand the First Edition of the Light Moves Festival of Screendance. Accessed on: 03 May 2019.
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