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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.

Lesson overview:

In today’s session we looked at the course content of Sound for Screen unit guide. We had a couple of administration tasks to do then we talked about the type of audio visual language that’s used in the audio for sound industry. We also examined some historical examples of sound for screen and how early pioneers helped shape cinemas relationship with sound and its connection to sound art.

Historical pioneers for cinema

Walter Murch (1943)

Walter Murch (1943) is an American film editor and sound designer. Some of his works include sound design for Apocalypse Now and The Godfather trilogy. Murch believed in what he called the three rules of sound. These include Emotion, Story and Rhythm. we would typically call this a synopsis. Meaning the outline of the plot for a play, film or book. His approach encourages us to ask not just what sound is, but why it’s there and what emotional or narrative role it serves.

Dziga Vertov (1896-1954)

Vertov (1954) became famous because he pioneered sound montage, he created meaning by cutting clips together. He became famous for his movie Man With A Movie Camera (1934), he created a movie depicting a day in the life of a modern soviet city in the nineteen hundreds, his use of quick cuts and stop motion was revolutionary for its time and changed the way films where made. Vertov’s work showed that sound and image could be assembled like building blocks to create new layers of meaning.

Sound Design

What is a sound track?

A sound track incorporates music and pretty much everything else that doesn’t include sound design. It forms the emotional bedrock of the viewing experience.

what is sound design?

Sound design looks more at creating a sound environment for the film or media that could be made from collecting sounds or creating them using synths and so on.

Paul Davis on Sound Design

Paul Davis is a sound designer that worked on You Where Never Really Here which is a thriller and crime film about a troubled mercenary. He believes that a good film director understands that sound design is a powerful storytelling tool. Sound works on a different level and works a different area to the brain which is perhaps more primitive which is why good sound design is so effective for horror movies. It can also be used subtly in other genres, helping shape an emotional tone without the viewer even noticing.

The elements that make up a soundtrack

• Non/sync and sync sounds- Non sync refers to the sound on screen that is not synchronised to the visual on screen, and sync is sound effects that are synched with the visual on screen
• Diegetic/Non diegetic sounds- Diegetic is a sound that doesn’t exist in the world or on screen that the characters can hear, Non diegetic is what the actors cant hear like voice overs or musical elements
• ADR- Audio Dialogue Replacement is the use of all post production audio change to voices
• Dialogue
• Atmospheres – Things like traffic noises or sound FX that you go out and capture
• Foley – Synched sound performed for screen
• Sound Design – Tracks or Non synced sound

Practical

At the end if the lesson we went out with Zoom field recorders and took some audio samples form the environment around us to try and isolate and map the sounds we hear. This exercise I felt was really useful to separate and contextualise there noises that you usually hear around you to put them into a separate box from what you relate it to. I took out some paper and we draw a audio mind box to visualise what we where hearing and it was a little bit difficult at the start to try and draw and code what I was hearing but I understand there is some use to map and layer what we are hearing.

Watching

Disappearing Sounds

Cities and Memories

Stuart Fowkes

He is trying to save the worlds sounds that are disappearing and looks for the defining sounds of a certain place that we may never hear again. It’s an important piece of work as sound isn’t always factored in when we think about a loss or change. Some sounds are already disappearing or gone completely and I think its good to try and store some distinctive sounds in a ever changing world. This project really shows how fragile and fleeting sonic landscapes can be.

Reflection

Listing to the examples seen in the lecture today I noticed a difference. Instead of treating sound as something that just “happens” around me, I found myself tuning in with intention, almost like I was peeling back sonic layers I hadn’t noticed in the past. The field recording exercise made the world feel both familiar and strange. A simple breeze, footsteps and distant traffic are things I would normally ignore suddenly felt meaningful and cinematic.

I noticed how much of our emotional world is shaped by sound without us realising. The lessons about Murch, Vertov and sound design made me see sound as an invisible thread that ties them together. It can guide thew audience, unsettle them and or comfort them.

What struck me most is the idea that almost every sound has a place and a story if its own. Today made me more aware of how important it is to listen, not just hear. I think moving forward in this course, I want to pay more attention to those quiet details that usually go unnoticed.