Soundscape
I am really enjoying watching videos by David F. Sandburg, the director of Shazam! (2019). He gives lots of useful information, and I recently watched one of his videos about Sound. It was part of a series that he did in the run up to a film competition, the MyAnnabelleCreation contest, back in 2017, before he filmed Shazam!
He explains that one of the things that “gives away first-time filmmakers or filmmakers starting out when they make shorts, is the sound”. He says that “in our films, what I usually do is throw out all the sound and replace it in Post”. He sometimes keeps in some dialogue in and replaces everything else, and he adds that that’s usually the way it’s done in Hollywood, you keep most of the dialogue and replace everything else. He points out that doing that gives you extra control.
I hadn’t actually realised that they replace quite so much. I knew that in films they usually add lots of Foley sound effects, background music, and generally build up a soundscape, which I very much want to do in my Year 2 FMP. But it is interesting that they strip the sound right back.
I enjoyed making Foley sounds in our Foley Project in Unit 11. As well as our 90% Bloopers Group recording Foley sounds in the College woods for this Foley Project, I also tried recording Foley sounds at home that weren’t what they seemed. I tried the famous bacon sizzling to sound like rain. And even just recording bacon sizzling using my phone, rather than the usual College Zoom H5 that I often borrow, it really did sound like rain, even with no enhancement or anything. Another one I tried was an idea that I came up with, which was to use various of my (many) Dungeons and Dragons dice to drop into a sink of water to make a dripping tap “plop” type sound. I did tests with different sided dice (4, 6, 8, 10, 12 and 20-sided dice) plus an extra-large one to see which made the most convincing sound. I did use the Zoom H5 Audio Recorder for the “dripping tap” sounds, with a Sennheiser ME66/K6 mic.
I have used a bit of Foley before in a few projects. Here are a couple of quotes from my write up on the Foley Project:
I am going to experiment with using one of the Foley sounds that my 90% Bloopers Group recorded for the Unit 11, one of the footsteps sounds. But I think it may be a bit too “crunchy” since there were loads of dried leaves where we recorded it, but very few on the paths in the wood for my Year 2 FMP. [Update, it did end up sounding too crunchy but I’m glad I experimented with it.]
David F. Sandburg said that on his shorts they spend most of the time on the sound. He said the shoots can be quick but recording all the Foley takes a long time. When I think about it, this does make sense. Admittedly I am doing much more with the sound for my Year 2 FMP than for my other films, but I am spending much longer on editing my sound than I did on filming the video. We had a lesson last term with Attila (tutor) and Abdulla (tutor) on sound, when we discussed the importance of sound in movies, and how the soundscape as a whole can total change the feel of a film. We also talked about Diegetic sound, that is, any sound that is part of the characters’ world and can be heard by characters and Non-diegetic sound, that is, sounds that are not part of the characters’ world and cannot be heard by characters.
If it is a sound, you don’t always have to have the source of the sound on screen, it can also be off-screen diegetic sound, like when you hear police sirens and the audience assume that police cars are very close-by. And I had made use of the “Is it diegetic? Is it non-diegetic?” question when I made my film “Serebrus Serum” for my Film Studies GCSE by having a car zooming along to what I wanted the audience to initially assume was non-diegetic music (“Freebird” by Lynyrd Kynyrd).
There is a link on my main website to “Serebrus Serum” if you want to see it under “Independent Films”. It is 4 minutes 55 seconds long (it had to be less than 5 minutes)
When the car stops, I switch to showing outside the car and I show the audience a shot of a hand moving towards the car key, about to turn off the car. As soon as I switch to inside the car, I give the music a more “tinny” sound to suggest that it was actually coming from inside the car. Then when the hand turns the key, I stop the music abruptly as if turning off the car was what stopped the music being played in the car, as it would do if it were being played in the car. I was pleased with this and got very positive comments about it in my feedback.
I am using a similar effect in my Year 2 FMP, by having the music over the Opening Credits appear as if it is non-diegetic. However, half-way through the Opening Credits the character Sam stops and takes his right headphone earbud out. If you are listening with headphones on, which I do recommend you do, and you have the right and left the correct way round, at this point you will hear the music in your right side of the headphones stop and be replaced by birdsong, as the character Sam just has done too. This is the first hint to the audience that this music is not non-diegetic but is actually diegetic.
When Sam stops walking and starts talking, I do the same thing with the music as I did in “Serebrus Serum” which shows the audience even more strongly that this music is diegetic music as it is what Sam was listening to on his headphones.
I love playing around with sound like this, like Edgar Wright did in Baby Driver 2017). What Edgar Wright does is really advanced, but I find him really inspiring.
The point that David F. Sandburg confirms for me, by saying that most of his time goes on the sound, is how vital it is to work hard on your sound. I often use the quote from Martin Scorsese, “if you don’t get physically ill after seeing your first rough cut, something is wrong”, because I never like my films after I have just worked on the video. But once I start adding any sound at all I start liking it a lot more. On this course I have really expanded what sound I now think about adding, and my research for this film has expanded this even more.