Exploring Sound in Film

Sound Design Research

While emerging in the editing process, I realized that a lot of our decisions to keep, delete, or shorten takes would impact the sound choices. The film up to this point was hard to follow at first glance so before we "finalized" a draft, I decided to learn the basics and achievements within sound design to hopefully come up with ways my editor could bridge this gap. Learning the power of sound in films expanded my ability to add suggestions that could later aid my sound designer when the time came to add music and sound effects as well.

Part of my sound design research was looking into the movies awarded handsomely for their sound design. One of these movies was Gravity, 2013, in which the setting is represented as space.

Movie poster of Gravity, 2013 showing the setting in which the movie is meant to represent. It is important to note that this movie is a sci-fi thriller drama, so the sounds are meant to be dramatic and eerie in relation to this setting — unlike my group's comedy, which relies on ironic, non-diegetic sound to create humor. Sound can change the audience's reaction!

A video I watched discussing the specific methods used to obtain the sound in the movie, revealed how dependent they were on vibrational audios (transducer recording) rather than airborne regular audio.

This is unique to the movie for the reason that it is supposed to mimic "space sounds" but nonetheless taught me the extent to which sound can be manipulated and should be used to reflect the atmosphere in some cases to powerfully convey the setting.

A sound design crash course video was provided by my instructor, which I watched to give me insight into what my sound designer will be doing. My editor and I could make more informed editing decisions with this in mind.

The most important takeaway of this research and new terminology learned for my role as director was that sound has the full capability to not just tell a story, but improve the edits. This lifted my hopes for how our film could change once sound was added. Some other terms I learned from the video are ambiance, reverb audio, various sound platforms my sound designer could use for free, such as Soundly, and what tools specifically can be found within Adobe Premiere Rush to heighten dramatic sounds.

Editing and Its Relation to Sound

When doing genre research for my film, I noticed a pattern of using sped-up or slowed-down takes with music changes to create comedic effects. This was something my group was really excited to incorporate into the film involving the chess board and our characters. 

A clip from Blended, 2014, utilizes slowed editing to produce humor, along with dramatic music changes from one character reaction shot to another.

As the girl walks up, reactions from other characters looking at her are also slowed down with the music shifted to fit the expression or impression each had of her. My editor used Adobe Premiere Rush as his main editing software for the rough cut, which has a tool to slow and speed up clips. Since fitting the film into a minute was still a struggle, we decided this comedy genre editing technique could be beneficial in more ways than one. We sped up certain long takes and slowed gameplay moves for dramatization — not by a lot, but enough for it to still remain a short take. 

A clip that was slowed down to induce the dramatization of gameplay between the opponents, specifically when the girl starts to win the game.

The slow motion also helped draw attention to how aggressive the move was, with the entire board shaking and pieces falling. It is intentionally unrealistic to how one would play the game in real life and contrasts with chess being popularly known as a quiet, calming game for comedic effects. The sound pairs with the slow-motion clip by playing rock music to symbolize the association it has with winning or doing something 'cool' in movies. Additionally, a whooshing sound can be heard when the player picks up the chess piece with an added layer of a slowed 'boom' noise that is heard when the white chess piece knocks over the other.

A clip that we sped up for certain parts (velocity edit) paired with a sudden shift to lighthearted classical music towards the end to add to the randomness of our film's ending. The quickened skipping away from the girls after she takes the win served for comedy purposes and shortens this long take to better fit the one-minute duration requirement. All edits involving slowing or speeding up a clip were done with sound design in mind!