Month: October 2025

This four minute poet film by Margret Tait touches natural elemental feeling like water, air and fire. It doesn’t follow a narrative sonically and is more structured for a musical score than a narrative driven film. Instead of us pushing through a plot, Tait constructs a world of rhythms, textures and emotional pulses.

Taits films and life

“One of avant-garde film’s best kept secrets, Margaret Tait was a fearless independent artist working across film, art and poetry. With 1992’s Blue Black Permanent, she was the first Scottish woman to direct a feature film, yet her work was scarcely seen in Britain during her lifetime – even as she developed a small but dedicated following among the international artists’-film community.”

Margret Tait was remarkably independent filmmaker, poet and artist. Her work existed on the edges of the British film world during her lifetime, yet she quietly built a dedicated following internationally. She made Blue Black Permanent in 1992, becoming the first Scottish woman to direct a feature film, but long before that she had already carved out her path creatively.

Tait when talking about her films used to call them film-poems, her films where designed to function like poems, short, lyrical and anchored in the rhythms of everyday life. She often worked in short musical and lyric driven narratives. Her approach to natural movements of life (a garden or a dead bird) so that the ordinary becomes insightful to the watcher. Aerial is a great example of her approach, her consideration for an emotional response, almost like the world itself is speaking. The emotional response comes from the simplicity of the images and the trust Tait places in the audiences imagination.

watching her work and reading about her process has pushed me to think more deeply about how sound can respond to visuals. Im especially inspired by how she listens to the world, not to create it literally but to shape it and reflect its energy. In thinking about my own sound design, I keep coming back to her elemental approach and how I might echo that sensibility in my film.

My sound pallet

• Ambience/ Field recording– Wind going through the heather, water lapping at the bay. Feint village and town hum like a quiet road.
• Foley/ Close mic sounds – footsteps on a layer of snow, (boots on fabric). Pebbles on concrete, crackling fire the compressed layer of snow compressed by footsteps.
• Musical elements– Short guitar, short notes played sparsely. I want to keep the notes resonated out recorded in a large room or added reverb. Also I would like to add drones, a small hiss or bass hum from a synth
• Found/ Processed sound -Lightly distorted bird hum, the crackle of a radio or the hum of an engine. I want to reprocess these noises into a different direction

Editorial strategy

Start -I want to introduce a clear motif or elemental noise (wind or a single guitar note) to set the films elemental tone.

Middle -I want to start to alternate between captured sound like water lapping and intimate foley. Let the musical elements begin to intertwine with the natural ones, building a subtle without becoming overly narrative.

End -Start to let the piece drown out naturally into white noise or distorted sound and start to cut out musical element, make sure its controlled and organic, almost like an exhale.

Film-poems

What draws me to Tait’s idea of film-poems is the way she places meaning in rhythm, breath and image rather than in explanation. When I first read about her, I was struck by her devotion to seeing things ‘freshly’. Her short works can carry this belief: that the small things in life, the movement of clouds or a flicker of light are enough to build an entire emotional universe.

Thinking about including my own poem in my work feels like a natural extension of this. Not as narration, but as an undercurrent or a guide to the rhythm of the piece. Like Tait’s films I want my own work to be like poetry that doesn’t need to literal.

Visual notes

The films consists of images of nature: Clouds, birds, light reflections, water sky and movement of air. I really like the way she has pieced all these things together, the imagery is rhythmic and cynical which brings on this feeling of reflection, which falls into Tait’s idea of seeing things freshly “as though one had been born into it”.

Reflection

Engaging with Tait’s work has shifted they way I approach sound for film. Instead of seeing sound purely as a tool for realism or continuity. Im starting to think of it as emotional and elemental, something that carries meaning in a way that visuals can’t. Tait’s film-poetic approach encourages me to slow down, to notice the textures of the world and to trust simplicity. I want the soundtrack to feel alive, to breathe with the images and carry its own quiet poetry. Ultimately, my goal is to create a sonic landscape that doesn’t just accompany the film but deepens the viewers connection to it.

Hunger by Steve Mcqueen

• This a great example of how you don’t need lots of dialogue in a film to gain context. In fact, McQueens choice to minimise spoken words creates a hyperrealistic sonic world in which every sound feels weighted with meaning.
• we watched the first couple of scene and I understand the stylistic choice to make the audio hyperrealistic. Things like the drag of a cigarette can be heard from our perspective to give context, not simply as a noise, but as a piece of storytelling that connects us to the characters inner world.
• This way of telling a story not through word of mouth but by sonic realism has given me some good insight into the worth of someone making audio for film. This creates a more active relationship between viewer and film, which is something I’m becoming increasingly interested in for my own sound redesign project.
• The spacious use of dialogue actually allows the watcher to feel inclined to understand the events unfolding on screen. It’s a useful way to keep the audience hooked.
• The introduction not only communicates what’s goes on with our character, it also communicates what’s going on a social and political scale within the confines of this era of Ireland. Through footsteps, breath, the scrapes of chairs and the metallic clangs of the prison environment, we come to understand the atmosphere of tension and dehumanisation long before er get any explicit context. Sound becomes a vessel for the films political weight

Walter Murch’s words encapsulate this perfectly

“You have more freedom with sound than you do with picture. There are, consequently, fewer rules. But the big three things—which are emotion, story, and rhythm—apply to sound just as much as they apply to picture. You are always primarily looking for something that will underline or emphasize or counterpoint the emotion that you want to elicit from the audience. You can do that through sound just as well as through editing, if not more so. Rhythm is obviously important; sound is a temporal medium. And then story. You choose sounds that help people to feel the story of what you’re doing.“

How can sound create character?

• We talked a lot about the use of sound, the sound being a firm part in film and art.
• Audio and dialogue play a huge part in hoe we view a character, from what they say to how they sound. Dialogue reveals intention, background and emotion. However sound design and Foley reveal texture, physicality and psychological state.
• Sound design and foley also play a crucial part on how a character is created, if want a character who is a heavy mercenary for example you would add a heavier foot step to shape them in a more aggressive way. Meanwhile, a nervous character might have quicker, lighter movements, the rustle of clothing or the subtle trembles of objects that touch.
• Motifs can add character by adding a soundtrack you can evolve that character musically. They become part of the character identity. Through reassuring musical phrases or signature sound cues
• Silence also can be a powerful tool into creating character

A Strange Border – Essay on Music & Sound, by Paul Davies

Davis writes about the transitional space between music and sound design, where ’emotional interpretation’ becomes fluid. Though I didn’t explore the full essay, one idea stuck out to me is the notion that sound exists on a boundary between the litra and the symbolic. It can represent real world physics but I can also slip into abstraction that evokes memory, mood or subconscious meaning. This is also something I can see myself experimenting with in my own film, using sound not only as music to mimic the world onscreen but to hint at the emotional world off screen.

Reflection

Across all these films and concepts from Pinewoods Foley craft to Hunger, Murch and Davis, I’ve realised how deeply sound shapes our experience of cinema. It’s more than an accessory to the image; it’s a language that can transform the emotional and narrative core of a story. What I once thought as a technical layer now feels like an expressive medium in its own right, capable of carrying symbolism and helps also to shape character and audience perception.

As I move into redesigning the sound for my own film project, I’m approaching it not just as a technical exercise, but as a creative opportunity. I’m thinking more intentionally about the choices I make, how prop texture can effect the meaning of a moment, how silence can pull a viewer closer and how motifs narrate the inner life of a character. I feel more attuned to the artistry behind sound and I’m excited to apply these ideas in ways that will hopefully resonate on both a narrative and emotional level.

• Our jobs as students studying sound for screen are to choose a reason for the choices we make when coming to recording. Every decision should have intention behind it.
• We think about aesthetics and why we collect sound in a certain way and what effect it has
• Synchresis – Is the forging between sound and image. What we hear and what we see snapping into a relationship that feels natural, even if its completely artificial.
• We as audio engineers are able to play with perspective and distance shaping how close or far the audience feels from a sound source.
• We want to do this and understand the becoming off what we create, the transition from raw sound to meaningful audio.
• Our goal is create character to our sound, however, we can only do this when we become conscious and deliberate about the choices we make.

John Akomfrah

• John Akomfrah is a sound designer and artist that has had work put up in the Tate.
• He says he is really interested in the “conversation” that goes on between noise. Noises can suggest direction or emotion even before the image reveals it.
• He believes there are sonic ways of knowing the world, like how nightclubs or music scenes allows us to discover people through the music first.
• He believes music can alter and change the space that you are in, that’s why its such a powerful tool

Review of the arrangement for my sounds collected

Last week we went out and recorded environmental audio whilst making a sonic map of what we heard around us. I collected some audio signals into an arrangement and in todays lecture we watched a short film with my audio layered in top. Surprisingly, it worked really well. I think the lack of strict goal I just wanted to experiment with form, texture and placement. Somehow those “strange” arrangements created a dreamlike dissonance that suited the footage.

This has inspired me to explore dreamscape music and sounds that feel deliberately absent or unsettling, sonic landscapes that feel lost or even half remembered, like a memory that doesn’t fully belong to me. I want to incorporate more of that haunting and or liminal feeling into the film.

The voice in cinema

• Voice in cinema is the crux of setting up perception for the watcher, In every mix there is a voice and that voice commands attention and has a hierarchy to all other sound
• The level and the noise of the voice have to be artificially enhanced over the sounds, to isolate the voice from background or ambient sound

The Voice Of Cinema by Michel Chion

This book looks at examples of directors and filmmakers who have used the disembodied voice in their films, the likes of Hitchcock’s Psycho and Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey. How have these directors used the heard but not seen voice to build suspense in these films? Chion explores the hidden and faceless voice and its story telling powers.

Gaze in cinema

Laura Mulvey Essay on the Female Gaze in Cinema

• Mulvey talks brilliantly about the female and male gaze in cinema, gaze refers to the point of view of the people who made the film
• The female and male gaze refers to a split between narratives within the story with the man in the story going out and getting things done and progressing the film. Whereas the female in films are made to be looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic purposes

Larry Achiampon

• Achiampon’s films explore some themes of identity, mental health and race
• His use of narration in his films bring out the hidden fire within his films. His music is dreamlike and minimal and moving
• The point of view of his films are from the point of view of himself, his films bring up some raw emotion from digital identity in a modern age to the complexities of class

Reflections

As I move into making a conscious decision into what I want to do for my hand in for this unit, I’m realising how much sound is not just a technical craft but a way of sensing the world around you. Sound become a story that sit underneath the visuals, shopping feelings that audience absorbs before even have time to realise it. This feels lessons Akomfrah’s ideas about sonic knowledge, Mulvey’s exploration of gaze and Chion’s disembodied voices have made me more aware of how sound can speak from the edges of a film, guiding attention and shaping emotion.

When I listen in to the sounds around me Im actively trying to be more attentive. Im listening for textures and the quiet clues that reveal a spaces inner life. Looking at possibly making my own music or sound design for a film, I want to be able to make my own world. A world where sound is the character itself, carrying memories and tension that the visuals alone can’t hold.