In Film Project Two I was able to apply my skills but also learn a great deal from the process. Heading into film project two I really wanted to make a more creative experimental short film. My original pitch was going to be similar to virtual reality where a character would either put on a headset or each time they changed rooms they are transported somewhere different and each time the genre changes. Collaborating with Kay to create Sentiment was great as our ideas were pretty similar and I could take the same research focus of immersion – through sound design and colour – and apply it to this film. We were very much inspired by the works of Sofia Coppola and Emmanuel Lubezki. Coppola cleverly uses different lighting and colour palettes to portray the internal emotions of her characters. Colour and lighting inspiration also came from Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997) and Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016). I think it is interesting to compare the subdued colours versus bright and vibrant, but they all have similar effects on the audience. Lubezki’s cinematography in The Tree of Life (2014) frames it so that the camera is moving freely, often in one long take, it seems effortless while serving to move the story forward. In terms of sound design I was particularly inspired by Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006) and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). Both of these films include very powerful scenes where the sound design is layered to heighten tension or have the effect of transporting the audience into the mind of a character.  

 

Kay and I worked well together to plan our shots as our film is very reliant on shots linking up. Our script was easier to write in the sense that our film has no dialogue. However, telling our story through action and characters movements or facial expressions can also be difficult if it is not written clearly. Once we had properly planned out each scene, through a detailed shot list, we could discuss more of what effects there will be and whether this will be added in post-production or not.

Production was a great opportunity for me further my creative development. I was in charge of sound design where I used the zoom H4n microphone to record everything.Sound is one of the most important elements of a film but it is also the one that gets left until the end, and I didn’t want that to be the case for our film. I wanted to capture heaps of different sounds that would come together and overlap in the editing process. For the beach scenes, I took sounds of the ocean waves, footsteps on sand, my hand moving shells or pebbles, wind and more. I made sure that I captured these individual sounds from different positions and angles, so when there is a wide shot the sound will seem far away compared to the close-up where it will become louder and more distinct. One the second day I had the opportunity again to capture the environment. The city is so rich with sounds and you often don’t think about how much there is to record there. I wanted to get the more obvious sounds that surrounded the city these included the people, the nature. There are a lot of scenes of the vehicles  in the city such as trams, traffic lights and more so I made sure to get up close to these individual sounds to truly capture them. I also paid attention to our actors movement and using the same surface I used my shoes and hands to create the sound effect of her moving when she is dancing so that this adds to the texture of our scenes. The same goes for the city scenes I managed to capture heaps of nature, transport or people sounds, sounds which will be critical in the scene where all of the sounds overlap but as the camera zoom in becomes more and more mute.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For any scenes, such as the home scenes, where I wasn’t available to film I created my own foley. Creating foley is quite challenging, but when it comes together and matches well with the footage it is very rewarding. A lot of the sounds are realistic, so there wasn’t any room to be overly creative like you would be with animation. However foley challenged me to really think critically about each sounds and how it was being used in the film and how I would recreate this through sound. I managed to have the exact equipment used in the home scenes which was lucky. I laid all of the equipment on the bench including the hot chocolate container, the mug, the kettle and the spoon and set my laptop in front of me so that I could watch the footage from the home scenes and mirror the characters actions. Michel Chion states that “sounds often have not just one source but at least two, three, even more…most of the time [the audience] is dealing not with the real initial causes of the sounds, but causes that the film makes us believe in.” Taking this into account I made sure that I captured even the smallest of sounds and when I started to think about this the more you realise how many sounds in a scene there actually are. For example, picking up the spoon required not just the spoon movement but the sounds of the hands grabbing it or any other gestures. As all of the sounds are filling in this scene, which is mute, every detail needs to be prominent to create the feeling that the scene is real. This was very hands-on and quite a unique and fun experience. I made sure that I did many different takes so that the sounds would come across as genuine and unique to our film.

My role was not strictly limited to sound design. Kay and I were able to work collaboratively as co-directors in a way. We were each able to bring and share our own ideas which really benefitted our film and research purposes. It was great as with any filming I could ensure that the sound was properly captured for that shot or if I recorded sound that there would be enough footage. I also had the opportunity to use the Canon 5d mark 2 camera. This was a great camera for us to use in our film and the ability to create depth of field added more visual appeal for our film. One of the problems that we came across on our second day of production was the booking of the equipment. On our second and final shooting day we weren’t able to use the same camera, as we foresaw this issue we were lucky that we were able to get a majority of shooting done on the first day. Due to this we needed to think more about an artificial lighting setup, as previously our film had been based around natural lighting only. We were also filming in a dark corner without a lot of backlight from the sun. We were able to overcome this problem by using the LED Light (battery powered) lighting equipment, which acted as a fill light. I moved around the scene to work out the best angle and distance that would highlight our actors face without it coming across as too bright or yellow ensuring also to not take anything away from the background.  I found that by shooting at a higher angle and standing about a metre or two from the actor gave us the desired effect and it did really make a difference in the end, highlighting the importance of background or fill lighting and not just relying on the post-production stage. One problem of the sound was the dreaded battery. I had recorded most of what we needed to record, however, it did run out,which can be annoying, but I was able to use my phones recording system to get the rest of the sounds. This couldn’t be avoided as straight after I had collected the equipment we started filming, and our audio recorder needed to be charged, however it is a great lesson in knowing your equipment and making sure that if something is not battery powered to make sure that we have the availability to charge before or the ability to charge when needed during production. There were a lot of lessons learnt during production, but most importantly I felt that I was able to experiment and use different equipment more to further my technical development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The editing process was one of the more challenging aspects for our project. Our planning going into production proved to be very useful as all of the shots that we needed matched up nicely in the end. I had set out to research immersion, and in doing this project I realised the importance of sound design. The moment when the character falls breaking her ankle and hitting her head against the ground was one our most graphic scenes, in comparison to the rest of our film. This was the scene where the Interstellar inspiration came into place more, in the launch scene the sounds build and build there are overlays of diegetic sound effects, dialogue and a score that gets louder until the rocket launches where the score becomes cut off. Similarly, we used the quiet piano score to reflect the peaceful dancing scenes and the crashing and distorted rumbling and ringing automatically disrupt this beauty revealing the harshness of the impact while also bringing the audience into the characters pain and her perspective. The difficulty was deciding when to cut the linking shots without the match cuts being too fast for the audience or out of pace, especially in the falling and accident scene. I drew on the techniques of immersion to create the breaking ankle and crashing sound effects as she falls and hits her head. This scene aims to engage the audience beyond purely the visuals and a more visceral response from audiences – that engages all of their senses.

 

 

 

Another challenge of our film was knowing what sounds to use and where they were coming from. I wanted to experiment with the effect that perspective can have on an audience. One of the scenes in particular was when the character is listening to music on her headphones, initially you can hear the sound as an audience, but it is only when she places it in her ear the sound disappears where I hoped to transport and immerse the audience making it diegetic and bringing them inside the character’s mind. I added low pass effect to the audio to make it more believable that it was coming from the headphones and wasn’t taking away from the tone of our film. This was heavily inspired by Babel where the deaf teenager goes to the club and you can hear the music until the camera shifts to her point of view and there is just silence, I thought that this was a very effective and clever technique and I was glad that we were able to implement it into our film.

The scene where the sounds and visuals are overlapping and become softer to emphasis that the hearing loss is having an effect on the character, really helped us to create perspective for our audience. As from the long or midshot is feels like more of an observer’s point of view but as it zooms in the audience is immersed into the mind of the character, only hearing what she hears. One of the sound effects elements that we could have implemented more into our film was utilising silence. There were certain scenes such as the dancing that was only non-diegetic music and others were the surrounding nature sounds became mute. However, there was still music or ringing sounds in these sections and a scene where we juxtaposed loud sounds to silence could have been very impactful. This is something to consider in any future productions and would be something that I would be interested in developing further.

Lighting and colour are also one of our important elements in the film. Colour in film has the effect of subtly revealing key moments to the audience and getting them to have an emotional experience. Brown (1996, p. 12) states that “Lighting creates the environment for storytelling.” Using colour correction we added blue colour tints and hues to our home scenes which dramatically helped to communicate the ideas of isolation and tension but also that these scenes were from a different time or reality. With the flashbacks to the dancing scenes I experimented with a few effects, in the end I created an adjustment and used fast blur, by overlaying it on the footage it gave a nice shadow around the edges of the video and a dreamlike blur. This did make the video too bright but by lowering the exposure it worked a lot better. I would have liked there to be more of a dreamlike quality to it that truly distinguished it from the home scenes. However, when linking up the shots the similar shades of blue transitioned well and if we had done more of a dreamlike feel it may have been lost or too jarring during these scenes. We also added orange hues and tints to our opening and closing sequences. We didn’t want it to be as dramatic and overbearing as our blue tints as we wanted a more natural quality to it. Inspired by Coppola, this colour scheme would help to portray a sense of calmness and happiness from the setting and the character’s internal emotions. While I did try to experiment more with the types of colours or temperature however, it would have been distracting and these decisions I think enhanced our film as Poland (2015, p. 69) found that “congruency with plot and film lighting have the most powerful impact on emotional response”.

 

 

 

 

The movement and transitions during the dancing scenes were inspired by Emmanuel Lubezki. The moments in our film where the camera moves freely and cross-dissolve transitions are used enabled us to help portray this style more. This style helped portray the feeling of time passing while also conveying the calmness and happiness that the character finds in the end. It would have been really great to add more experimental elements to our film or more of these stylised moments rather than the literal portrayal, however we were still able to play around with the sound effects and score in order to create the desired effect we had initially intended.

Overall, I was really happy with our films final cut and how Kay and I worked together. I felt that I had a lot more creative input into this film and it was very interesting exploring the topic of immersion, through colour and sound design. Immersion engages the audience and sound design and lighting both have the ability to transport the audience into the character and generate an emotional response. It was a good project to finish the semester on, as the focus of the course was about creating engaging and exciting screen experiences. Hopefully, our film engaged with these elements and theories of immersion and this topic is something that interests me and would be good to continue to further what I have learnt and use it in future projects.

Other Documents:

RMIT Personal Release

Production Schedule

Shot List

Script

References: