Category: Sound In Film

Picking a scene for this project proves a slightly difficult task. For me the reasons are…

• Picking a scene that you can stylistically work with.
• Pick a film in which you can break down and understand its full context.

The first point is important, having a film that you can stylistically work with is crucial. It’s good to push yourself outside of your comfort zone and work on something you normally wouldn’t do, but it’s good to work with something you can stylistically work with. I love working with horror, experimental cinema, and thriller/disturbing films. So for this project, I am searching for a scene that is unnerving but has room for experimentation sonically.

The second point which is having to break down and understand the film’s full context is an important point people tend to forget. When working in film (or just media in general) it’s one big collaborative effort, so if you don’t understand what the work is trying to do or say, then how will you get the sound right? Lots of directors keep the meaning of their films a mystery, David Lynch is a good example of this, as he refuses to give away the main meaning of his films. But this doesn’t mean you can’t understand what the film is trying to say, and you can still gather what the general meaning is and your own interpretation too.

Also if a film takes place in a certain time period e.g. the 1960s. Do some research on that time period, and how that time period is used in the film. Also looking at how people used sound in films from that generation could be a way to possibly incorporate those techniques into your own work. For example, if they used a reel-to-reel tape machine to record the sound design or music. See if you can get your hands on one, or use a plug-in to emulate that sound. Experimentation is key! So I think understanding a film is important before you start working on whatever it is you are doing!

After some thinking and research, I decided to work with David Lynch’s ‘The Alphabet’ (1969). I really enjoy Lynch’s style of film and found this short film to be really inspiring and found it had a lot of ways that I could experiment with sound and create an interesting piece to go alongside the film. My next blog will be about my thoughts for what the short should sound like sonically.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a Psychological thriller directed by Lynne Ramsey. The film follows Eva (Tilda Swinton) who is struggling to connect with her son Kevin (Ezra Miller), the film at its core is really about Eva and Kevin’s relationship, most of the film is spent showing us the struggle Eva goes through to bond with her son. She starts noticing increasingly dangerous behaviour which ends up leading to a mass shooting at his high school.

Throughout the movie, we flick between 3 different points of Eva’s life. The first being before she had a family and kids, she has aspirations of being a writer and a world traveller. The second is when she settled down with her husband and Kevin and her daughter is born, the final perspective being after the school shooting committed by Kevin.

The sound design for this movie is quite spectacular, it does a great job of putting you in the perspective of Eva and also uses lots of interesting tricks to play with the viewer. The opening of this movie has some interesting sound design choices. The film opens with a panning shot of an open door at night with a curtain obscuring the view of what’s behind. We hear a sprinkler noise which is used as a recurring motif throughout the movie, this creates a very uncomfortable atmosphere. Even though we do not know what happened the way the sound of the sprinkler and the panning shot is used lets us know something bad has happened.

We Need To Talk About Kevin inspired me by its use of taking average mundane noises like the sprinkler motif throughout the film and making them scary and uncomfortable. I have not chosen my film as of yet but am thinking of working in surreal horror and the use of field recordings to create horror in this film really clicked with me, and is going to be something I think about when I start creating my work.

Gaze – Dir. Farnoosh Samadi

Gaze is an Iranian short film about a woman who sees a man pickpocket someone on the bus home from work, after confronting the man she is stalked home in this very tense short film.

Gaze reminds me of Micheal Haneke, an Austrian film director who’s known for films with no music, slow pacing, long shots, and lots of tension. This short film in particular reminded me of his film Caché, which is a film that builds tension not through music but through sound design and cinematography.

Gaze is shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio which gives the film a claustrophobic feeling and the use of sound and foley to build tension adds to that feeling. In the final half of the short our main protagonist is being stalked by a man on a motorcycle, they used the sound of the motorcycle while it was off screen a lot of the time. You know the threat that the sound brings and it builds anxiety in the viewer and makes us think of questions like ‘Is she going to be caught?’ and ‘Will she make it home?’.

Overall I really enjoyed Gaze. I thought it was a thought-provoking, anxiety-inducing, and well-made short film.