Select from one of the readings, up to but not including Week 5, and briefly describe two points that you have taken from it. Points that excite you, something that was completely new to you.

The reading I chose is Bresson’s ‘Notes on the Cinematographer’. The text contains many effect points about filmmaking, specifiically about how to utilise sound:

‘What is for the eye must not duplicate what is for the ear.’ This point, while basic, really illustrates well why we shouldn’t just be happy with taking and using a single microphone recording from a shoot, and leaving it in the final product untouched. We spend so much time worrying about the visual -lighting, mis-en-scene, framing, angle, costume, design- yet too often the audio does not receive the same amount of care. Ideally, the sound needs to be constructed with as much detail as the image. This construction doesn’t just end with a good recording at the shoot. Sound effects, atmos, foley, musical cues, redubs, and a slew of other things should be added to the mix to really build an aural experience for the viewer that might not necessarily realistically correspond with what is happening on screen.

‘Image and sound must not support each other, but must work each in turn through a sort of relay.’ This point confused me at first, and admittedly it still does a bit now, but what I gather from it is that the brain is not capable of devoting equal attention to both sight and sound at any one time. One must be given prevalence. It’s how we notice things. When watching a film, you’ll notice the image first, and then maybe realise what the sound was like later, or it could be the reverse, where the sound grabs your attention and then your brain takes in the image in the next moment. Good films take advantage of this. One simple example is having a new and surprising sound cut into a scene unexpectedly, yet its source is still left off screen. After the characters react to this intrusion, the film then, and only then, cuts to whatever has made the sound. The initial sonic cue grabs the viewer’s attention, and the image backs it up and fills in the details. It is in this way that audio and visual material should work in tandem, pushing and pulling at the audience’s perception and attention.