As far as I know, a film basically consists two main elements Visual and Audio. Film makers use those two elements to communicate with the audience. Every image we see, every sound we hear from a film has its own meanings. At this stage, I suppose that the meaning of studying flimmaking is learning how to pull apart the two essences of a film. Unfortunately, my knowledge of cinematography is still very limit. In the mean time, I should keep pushing my knowledge of audio to a higher level and use visual as a supplement. I have worked with audio for a while, but I have not seriously investigated the nature of sound in film and sound design. I decided to dig deeper.

Sounds make a scenario alive. There are three categories of sound including diegetic, non-diegetic and external diegetic. No matter how many special visual effects are used in the movie, they won’t attract audiences without sounds. “Sound perception evokes mental images.” (Gabriele Proy 2002). Sound designers are the ones who bring viewers into the world created by the film. They lie to audiences to make them believe in what they see on the screen.

Oscar Wilde, a famous English writer, establishes the idea of lying. Art which comes from being realistic is a bad art. Great art comes from deceiving and lying. It tells everybody the untrue but beautiful things. Art is an subject of deception.

“Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art”

-Oscar Wilde-

Accuracy is not what we’re looking for. Our brain is more likely to embrace the lies. Most of the sounds we hear in a modern movie are fake, except the dialogue.

“The Jazz Singer” (1927) directed by Alan Croslan built the first mile stone of cinema evolution. The “talking pictures” were born as well as the field of post-production film sound.

Sound elements have the ability to manipulate the audience. For instance, the sound of ocean waves has the frequency of 12 cycles per minute respectively which  is similar to the frequency of breathing of a sleeping human. That’s why most people find the surf sound soothing and stress free. Music is an extremely powerful sound which affect our emotion. In a paper, Larry Sider (2003) mentions that:”Music not only imbues the image with emotional or cultural resonance, it also guides the viewer’s attention.”Sometimes, sound posses 50-1oo percent of a scene ( Larry Sider 2003).

Randy Thom (2011) states in his article:”Great sound design is not something that you apply cosmetically to an existing piece of work.” In class, Paul also emphasized that we should start to collect music as soon as possible. Music can be a guideline for our video editing if we plant to use it in our work. I edited this tiny sequence after listening to my own music collection.

I am thinking about making a sequence to compliment my audio story in the next couple of weeks as an experiment. This should help me practice filming and using audio as a guideline.

Reference cited:

Thom, R. (2011) Screenwriting for Sound; In  The New Soundtrack; Vol.: 1 No.: 2  September, p.103 – 112

Sider, L (2003. If you wish to see, listen, Journal of Media Practice, vol 4, no 1, p.5-16.