When I was a kid, my favourite movie was the 1967 classic, the Jungle Book. I recently saw the new adaption which I thought was awesome, but it brought me back to the original which I sat down and enjoyed just as much as I did when I was six years old and heedless and wild. I found myself for weeks after humming Bear Necessities as if I were a big blasé bear with no worries in the world. That’s what that movie really does me, it’s a evocative reminder to cool down – forget about my worries and my strife. As such I have decided to strip it down the basics, and look at one of my best-loved childhood characters Baloo.

I spoke in my last post  about what is behind the camera shaping the image seen in front of it. So for this exercise, I wanted to explore how editing and sound techniques have the ability to change the perceptions of a character.

I got this clip where Baloo meets Mowgli, and tried to see if I could make it something more sinister.

The original clip if fun and vibrant, but has these overlapping cuts to Bagheera running desperately towards what he believes is whimpering Mowgli in danger. I wanted to take this element of desperation and toy with the overtones of suspense felt by Bagheera in this scene, limiting myself to just the shots and vocal audio heard in this sequence. This is my rough cut:

Colour Correction: I saturation the original clip down to 70%, to try and take some of the ‘fun’ away. Such is a convention of children’s films, and reducing that slightly I felt did not take away from a level of innocence that adds a sense of eeriness. I also darkened the black tones to try and create more shadows and more mystery, particularly in Baloo. In the original, he is a kind of calming grey and think darkening this slightly may reflect darkening his character itself. This could definitely be done further and explored more thoroughly, but with my current skill set and just using the preset three-way color corrector in premiere, this is what I was able to achieve at this time.

Music: It’s quite clear that music does all the work here. I just got a royalty free ‘eerie track’ off the internet and laid it under the audio. I can tell that this helps to create and set the ambience of the scene – particularly evident when characters are inaudible. I tried the sequence first without sound, and besides having the obvious lack of atmosphere, the clips were disjointed and clearly cut due to the jumping audio. Setting a layered track below the scene serves several purposes, and its ability to create coherency is one that I don’t often commend. Editing can really be undermined by a lack of unity between clips, and regardless of shot matching or consistency, sound can be used as a tool to merge the layers of individual clips into something consolidated.

This task, besides being an excuse for me to listen to the Jungle Book soundtrack on repeat, has really solidified my perception of filmmaking perceptions – how we have the ability to create a certain character.