Implementing Sound Design in Your Own Films
The first step, which I hope we have already covered, at least in part, is appreciating the importance of sound design and what it can do in general terms to enhance the experience for your audiences. In my last message, the reply to Icba, I covered the next step in general terms, learning to hear/identify the fine detail in sound design which have been designed not to be consciously heard. Taking that step will enable you to study and analyse great films which you may own and start to take the next step, understanding how those sound design details can been employed to focus attention, generate pace, emotion, involvement and therefore entertainment value. While you will never stop learning these last two steps, I'm going to try to provide some practical tips on implementing sound design.
I've been doing sound design professionally for many years and while I still read and learn from the writings of others in the field, there are always parts (sometimes a lot of parts) I disagree with. This is as it should be, it's important for any artist (even a sound artist!) to have at least some different and original ideas. For this reason I never quote more than the odd sentence here and there from others. However, I'm going to break that rule on this occasion because there's nothing in what I'm going to quote I disagree with, it's packed with useful info and there seems no point in spending loads of time writing something which someone else has already written:
Telling a film story, like telling any kind of story, is about creating connections between characters, places, objects, experiences, and ideas. You try to invent a world which is complex and many layered, like the real world. But unlike most of real life (which tends to be badly written and edited), in a good film a set of themes emerge which embody a clearly identifiable line or arc, which is the story.
It seems to me that one element of writing for movies stands above all others in terms of making the eventual movie as "cinematic" as possible: establishing point of view. The audience experiences the action through its identification with characters. The writing needs to lay the ground work for setting up pov before the actors, cameras, microphones, and editors come into play. Each of these can obviously enhance the element of pov, but the script should contain the blueprint.
Let’s say we are writing a story about a guy who, as a boy, loved visiting his father at the steel mill where he worked. The boy grows up and seems to be pretty happy with his life as a lawyer, far from the mill. But he has troubling, ambiguous nightmares that eventually lead him to go back to the town where he lived as a boy in an attempt to find the source of the bad dreams.
The description above doesn’t say anything specific about the possible use of sound in this story, but I have chosen basic story elements which hold vast potential for sound. First, it will be natural to tell the story more-or-less through the pov of our central character. But that’s not all. A steel mill gives us a huge palette for sound. Most importantly, it is a place which we can manipulate to produce a set of sounds which range from banal to exciting to frightening to weird to comforting to ugly to beautiful. The place can therefore become a character, and have its own voice, with a range of "emotions" and "moods." And the sounds of the mill can resonate with a wide variety of elements elsewhere in the story. None of this good stuff is likely to happen unless we write, shoot, and edit the story in a way that allows it to happen.
The element of dream in the story swings a door wide open to sound as a collaborator. In a dream sequence we as film makers have even more latitude than usual to modulate sound to serve our story, and to make connections between the sounds in the dream and the sounds in the world for which the dream is supplying clues. Likewise, the "time border" between the "little boy" period and the "grown-up" period offers us lots of opportunities to compare and contrast the two worlds, and his perception of them. Over a transition from one period to the other, one or more sounds can go through a metamorphosis. Maybe as our guy daydreams about his childhood, the rhythmic clank of a metal shear in the mill changes into the click clack of the railroad car taking him back to his home town. Any sound, in itself, only has so much intrinsic appeal or value. On the other hand, when a sound changes over time in response to elements in the larger story, its power and richness grow exponentially.
Sadly, it is common for a director to come to me with a sequence composed of unambiguous, unmysterious, and uninteresting shots of a location like a steel mill, and then to tell me that this place has to be made sinister and fascinating with sound effects. As icing on the cake, the sequence typically has wall-to-wall dialog which will make it next to impossible to hear any of the sounds I desperately throw at the canvas.
In recent years there has been a trend, which may be in insidious influence of bad television, toward non-stop dialog in films. The wise old maxim that it’s better to say it with action than words seems to have lost some ground. Quentin Tarantino has made some excellent films which depend heavily on dialog, but he’s incorporated scenes which use dialog sparsely as well.
There is a phenomenon in movie making that my friends and I sometimes call the "100% theory." Each department-head on a film, unless otherwise instructed, tends to assume that it is 100% his or her job to make the movie work. The result is often a logjam of uncoordinated visual and aural product, each craft competing for attention, and often adding up to little more than noise unless the director and editor do their jobs extremely well.
Dialogue is one of the areas where this inclination toward density is at its worst. On top of production dialog, the trend is to add as much ADR as can be wedged into a scene. Eventually, all the space not occupied by actual words is filled with grunts, groans, and breathing (supposedly in an effort to "keep the character alive"). Finally the track is saved (sometimes) from being a self parody only by the fact that there is so much other sound happening simultaneously that at least some of the added dialog is masked. If your intention is to pack your film with wall-to-wall clever dialog, maybe you should consider doing a play!
When a character looks at an object, we the audience are looking at it, more-or-less through his eyes. The way he reacts to seeing the object (or doesn’t react) can give us vital information about who he is and how he fits into this situation. The same is true for hearing. If there are no moments in which our character is allowed to hear the world around him, then the audience is deprived of one important dimension of HIS life.
Sound effects can make a scene scary and interesting as hell, but they usually need a little help from the visual end of things. For example, we may want to have a strange-sounding machine running off-camera during a scene in order to add tension and atmosphere. If there is at least a brief, fairly close shot of some machine which could be making the sound, it will help me immensely to establish the sound. Over that shot we can feature the sound, placing it firmly in the minds of the audience. Then we never have to see it again, but every time the audience hears it, they will know what it is (even if it is played very low under dialogue), and they will make all the appropriate associations, including a sense of the geography of the place.
The contrast between a sound heard at a distance, and that same sound heard close-up can be a very powerful element. If our guy and an old friend are walking toward the mill, and they hear, from several blocks away, the sounds of the machines filling the neighborhood, there will be a powerful contrast when they arrive at the mill gate.
Let’s say we’re writing a character for a movie we’re making. This guy is out of money, angry, desperate. We need, obviously, to design the place where he lives. Maybe it’s a run-down apartment in the middle of a big city. The way that place looks will tell us (the audience) enormous amounts about who the character is and how he is feeling. And if we take sound into account when we do the visual design then we have the potential for hearing through his ears this terrible place he inhabits. Maybe water and sewage pipes are visible on the ceiling and walls. If we establish one of those pipes in a close-up it will do wonders for the sound designer’s ability to create the sounds of stuff running through and vibrating all the pipes. Without seeing the pipes we can still put "pipe sounds" into the track, but it will be much more difficult to communicate to the audience what those sounds are. One close-up of a pipe, accompanied by grotesque sewage pipe sounds, is all we need to clearly tell the audience how sonically ugly this place is. After that, we only need to hear those sounds and audience will make the connection to the pipes without even having to show them.
It’s wonderful when a movie gives you the sense that you really know the places in it. That each place is alive, has character and moods. A great actor will find ways to use the place in which he finds himself in order to reveal more about the person he plays. We need to hear the sounds that place makes in order to know it. We need to hear the actor’s voice reverberating there. And when he is quiet we need to hear the way that place will be without him.
Viewers/listeners are pulled into a story mainly because they are led to believe that there are interesting questions to be answered, and that they, the audience, may possess certain insights useful in solving the puzzle. If this is true, then it follows that a crucial element of storytelling is knowing what not to make immediately clear, and then devising techniques that use the camera and microphone to seduce the audience with just enough information to tease them into getting involved. It is as if our job is to hang interesting little question marks in the air surrounding each scene, or to place pieces of cake on the ground that seem to lead somewhere, though not in a straight line.
Sound may be the most powerful tool in the filmmaker’s arsenal in terms of its ability to seduce. That’s because "sound," as the great sound editor Alan Splet once said, "is a heart thing." We, the audience, interpret sound with our emotions, not our intellect.
Let’s assume we as film makers want to take sound seriously, and that the first issues have already been addressed:
1) The desire exists to tell the story more-or-less through the point of view of one or more of the characters.
2) Locations have been chosen, and sets designed which don’t rule out sound as a player, and in fact, encourage it.
3) There is not non-stop dialog.
Here are some ways to tease the eye, and thereby invite the ear to the party:
The Beauty of Long Lenses and Short Lenses
There is something odd about looking through a very long lens or a very short lens. We see things in a way we don’t ordinarily see them. The inference is often that we are looking through someone else’s eyes. In the opening sequence of "The Conversation" we see people in San Franciscoís Union Square through a telephoto lens. The lack of depth of field and other characteristics of that kind of lens puts us into a very subjective space. As a result, we can easily justify hearing sounds which may have very little to do with what we see in the frame, and more to do with the way the person ostensibly looking through that lens FEELS. The way we use such a shot will determine whether that inference is made obvious to the audience, or kept subliminal.
Dutch Angles and Moving Cameras
The shot may be from floor level or ceiling level. The frame may be rotated a few degrees off vertical. The camera may be on a track, hand held, or just panning. In any of these cases the effect will be to put the audience in unfamiliar space. The shot will no longer simply be "depicting" the scene. The shot becomes part of the scene. The element of unfamiliar space suddenly swings the door wide-open to sound.
Darkness Around the Edge Of the Frame
In many of the great film noir classics the frame was carefully composed with areas of darkness. Though we in the audience may not consciously consider what inhabits those dark splotches, they nevertheless get the point across that the truth, lurking somewhere just outside the frame is too complex to let itself be photographed easily. Don’t forget that the ears are the guardians of sleep. They tell us what we need to know about the darkness, and will gladly supply some clues about what’s going on.
Extreme Close-ups and Long Shots
Very close shots of peopleís hands, their clothing, etc. will tend to make us feel as though we are experiencing things through the point of view of either the person being photographed or the person whose view of them we are sharing. Extreme long shots are wonderful for sound because they provide an opportunity to hear the fullness or emptiness of a vast landscape. Carroll Ballards films The Black Stallion and Never Cry Wolf use wide shots and extreme close-ups wonderfully with sound.
Slow Motion
Raging Bull and Taxi Driver contain some obvious, and some very subtle uses of slow motion. Some of it is barely perceptible. But it always seems to put us into a dream-space, and tell us that something odd, and not very wholesome, is happening.
Black and White Images
Many still photographers feel that black and white images have several artistic advantages over color. Among them, that black and white shots are often less "busy" than color images, and therefore lend themselves more to presenting a coherent feeling. We are surrounded in our everyday lives by color and color images. A black and white image now is clearly "understood" (felt) to be someone’s point of view, not an "objective" presentation of events. In movies, like still photography, painting, fiction, and poetry, the artist tends to be most concerned with communicating feelings rather than "information." Black and white images have the potential to convey a maximum of feeling without the "clutter" of color.
Whenever we as an audience are put into a visual "space" in which we are encouraged to "feel" rather than "think," what comes into our ears can inform those feelings and magnify them.
What Do All Of These Visual Approaches Have In Common?
They all are ways of withholding information. They muddy the waters a little. When done well, the result will be the following implication: Gee folks, if we could be more explicit about what is going on here we sure would, but it is so damned mysterious that even we, the storytellers, don’t fully understand how amazing it is. Maybe you can help us take it a little farther." That message is the bait. Dangle it in front of an audience and they won’t be able to resist going for it. in the process of going for it they bring their imaginations and experiences with them, making your story suddenly become their story. success.
We, the film makers, are all sitting around a table in pre-production, brainstorming about how to manufacture the most delectable bait possible, and how to make it seem like it isn’t bait at all. (Aren’t the most interesting stories always told by guys who have to be begged to tell them?) We know that we want to sometimes use the camera to withhold information, to tease, or to put it more bluntly: to seduce. The most compelling method of seduction is inevitably going to involve sound as well.
Ideally, the unconscious dialog in the minds of the audience should be something like: "What I’m seeing isn’t giving me enough information. What I’m hearing is ambiguous, too. But the combination of the two seems to be pointing in the direction of a vaguely familiar container into which I can pour my experience and make something I never before quite imagined." Isn’t it obvious that the microphone plays just as important a role in setting up this performance as does the camera?
Editing Picture With Sound In Mind
One of the many things a film editor does is to get rid of moments in the film in which "nothing" is happening. A desirable objective most of the time, but not always. The editor and director need to be able to figure out when it will be useful to linger on a shot after the dialog is finished, or before it begins. To stay around after the obvious "action" is past, so that we can listen. Of course it helps quite a bit if the scene has been shot with these useful pauses in mind. Into these little pauses sound can creep on it’s stealthy little toes, or its clanking jackboots, to tell us something about where we have been or where we are going.
Taken from
"Designing A Movie For Sound" - Randy Thom
I'll give some more specific examples and practical advice in another post and of course, if you have any specific questions, feel free to fire away!
G
