I have not written anything since my last blog for Media 4. This brief is a good way to warm up my numb skull. Audio has been the element which appeals the most to me while watching a film. Sound makes up 50%-100% of a scene in cinema. Working with sound is not an easy task. I have encountered many valuable situation while working with sound for the last 2 years.

Sound is an essential element in both TV and radio Broadcasting. However, sound is often overlooked by inexperienced producers. From what I experienced while making the smoking documentary with my TV group, I suppose there is always a position for a sound person. The audio recorded directly from the camera was not usable. Fortunately, I recorded the audio separately with a Zoom H4n and a shotgun microphone. The separate audio was not the best, but it was definitely better than the one recorded with the camera. Most modern cameras have a screen or we can easily connect it to an external monitor. The camera man is not the only one who can monitor the visual. Recording audio on the field or on set is very important, so it should be handled by a sound person. Occasionally, we only have one chance to record an important interview but there are unwanted sounds in it such as car siren construct noise. That is where we need a skilled sound editor to fix it. Although it is not guaranteed that the audio is completely fixed, it is better than nothing.

Sound is even more critical in radio because it is the only way to communicate with audiences. The story itself is important, but it is the textual sound that makes the audience feels intimate to the piece. Janak Roger, an experienced radio producer, still needs a sound editor in the post-production for his works. In addition, the steady growth of radio listeners suggests a demand in radio producers.

The most difficult but rewarding task was when I took the role of a sound recordist and designer for my first short film. According to our plan, recording audio would be mainly onset since our main characters were children. Our team hoped to capture their unique emotions due to their playful nature. We were right about that, but it was more difficult than we had expected. To make the dialogue more natural, we did not ask them to say the script word by word. Let them play with the dialogue did give the natural sense as long as they kept key words and sentences. However, it raised unexpected problems when I was editing dialogues. The kids were coloring and talking at the same time when they play in the bedroom. It was nearly impossible to separate the dialogues with other sounds. I cut the raw files into “words” or even “letters” to make their dialogues more natural. It took me 70% of the time deal with dialogues. I put myself in the character’s shoes to feel what they actually hear.

The list is still going on, but this should be enough for a warm up. Hopefully, I will be inspired by something new in this semester. \

What does “True to Form” mean? I did not really get it even after I had read the description. It was not the end of world because I think most of the studio name do not make any sense. At least, I know this studio is about the whole process of film making. All I have worked since my first semester of the degree was audio. I picked “True to form” in the hope of gaining more hands-on experience of creating visuals in terms of camera and editing .

It was frustrated when Paul emphasized that all of our assignments will be marked based on our writing on the second day of the semester. Our process of learning and producing appeals to him, not the final product. My mind was numb. What is more important than a final product? In the world of cinema, the audience will not bother the process unless the film is good. Frankly speaking, writing is always hard for me. Blogging is even more tiresome since blogging should be a done in a willing state of mind, not a forced one. I felt working with equipment was far more interesting than blogging.

Then I realized that this could be a good learning method for me at this stage. The final product is crucial to a media creator, but I am not there yet. I am still a media student. I have not seriously reflected on my works recently. I know that reflecting will improve my analyzing skills in the long run but I hesitated to do so. It is time to sit down and reflect. It is time to step out of my comfort zone.

Discussing films in dept is still my limitation although I am a media student. At the end of the semester, I hope that I will have another media creation in my collection as well as be able to talk about films intellectually.

Our class divided into 3 teams to prepare for the studio presentation and I was involved in the website team. My group mates and I collected the information such as cast/crew background. We also worked together to make a trailer from our project and sent t to the editing team. Then I emailed personally to other team leader is they need a extra hand, but I think they managed to finish everything by the presentation day.

This one is quite different from my war dream. I still had to imagine and map out all of the possible sound elements that the characters are experience but it is based on the shooting script which our group created. It is more difficult than I expected. Having a script gave both advantages and disadvantages.

I did not have to map out and visualize the whole scenario from a scratch. I just browsed my sound library and pick sounds that I thought it would be suitable. I did record the sound of cutting cucumber on a chopping board. Actually, I used a carrot instead of a cucumber because it feels more solid. Recording just this simple sound wasn’t easy either. I did it at 5 AM to avoid noises and unwanted sounds. To isolate from the environment, I covered myself and the equipment. As a result, I think an isolated environment is essential while creating sound effects or foley.

After collecting all the sounds I need for the scene, except the dialogue, and mix them together, I felt something missing. Gabriele Proy (2001) claims that:”Sounds affect us, they contribute meaningfully to our comprihension of time and space.” Reading the script over again, I realised that it doesn’t provide the sense of time and space.  Mia is in the kitchen but at what time? How about the surrounding area? It is the environment that manipulate the audience. It brings viewers the feeling of being involved in the screen.

The audience is looking through the eyes/point of view of the character. They see what the character see as well as hear what the character hear. I believe that there is no completely no silent moment in film or in reality. Even if we enter a room without reverberation and external sounds, we can still hear your blood is pumping or your breath. There’s always some kinds noise like the humming of air conditioner or vibration of the fridge. They are ambiences. Ambiences are unique background sounds. They’re specific to each location. Each room has its own unique sound. To create such an experience for the audience, I have to be Mia. Randy Thom (2011)  states: “There is another way to set up the idea point of view: that is the idea that what are, the audience, are expecting is what is being experienced by characters on the screen.”

The problem is that I’ve never been to the actual location. So, I think my pre sound production is heavily relied on my own experience and imagination.

Reference cited:

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

Proy G. (2002), Sound and sign, Organised Sound, vol 7, no 1, p. 15-19

Instead of conceptualize a ‘family sound album’, I decided to do something different. I often have some kind of adventure or weird dreams early in the morning. Some I still remember, some I don’t. For this task, I tried to map out and build a sequence of sound to visualize my dream.

In fact, most people only remember a small fraction of their dream if they make some effort to memorize it. My intention is to tell a story using only sound elements. I imagined some of events to fill the gap of my dream. It’s kind of a fiction story so all of the sound effects are from my sound collection. I recorded the dialogue myself with a voice recorder. It was a good experience. Voice acting is not as easy as it seems to be. I had done over and over again with different tones before I got the right one, not to mention unwanted noises.

At first, the story ended with a big explosion. When asked my friend to listen to it, he was confused. He told me that it did not make any sense. I supposed it was easy for people to understand. I sent it to a few more, they didn’t understand either. Then I realized that I believed the story was easy to get just because I am its creator.

“If your screenplay does not emerge from your inner need to know; to express; to share; and to integrate, it will lack vitality and significance”

(Mehring-1990)

This short story lacks vitality because I don’t actually experience the event. It is possible that my dream is a reflection of what I watched during my day time. I’ve never actually been there, so it is understandable that my work does not have the “reality” and coherence. As far as I am concerned, not all film directors truly experience the every event in their works. At least, they have a chance to talk to the real people who have been there or witnessed. The director then put themselves in their shoes.

In the end, I extended the story with an alarm to indicate that this is just a dream. Of course, It’s doesn’t matter if a dream doesn’t make sense. This is a good experiment in terms of concept and techniques. I played around with reverberation plugins to create the announcement. Importantly, creating a story is not as hard as making people understand and believe in it. I’ll keep practicing for our first coming short film. Ready to blow your mind!

Reference cited:

Mehring, M 1990, ‘Theme’ in Screenplay : a blend of film form and content, Focal Press, Boston, pp. 221-230.

TERMINATOR 2

SOUND EFFECT

T-1000

Transformation: Gary Rydstrom sprayed Dust-Off into a water and flour mixture and recorded the sound with a condom-wrapped microphone slightly under the surface. The bubble, slowly made by Dust-Off, has both metallic and evolving quality. The sound was fit with T-1000 since it had beginning and an end.

Bullets hitting T-1000: An inverted glass was used to slam into a bucket of yoghurt. It sounds like bullets were sucked into its body.

Passing through steel bars: Dog food was being sucked slowly out of the can.

The sound when T-1000 spiked the foster father’s eye: Gary’s dog eating puppy chow.

Frozen T-1000: His cracking steps and movements come from the sounds of footsteps walking slowly on a frozen river surface and the sound of squeezing ice cubes from their trays.

Frozen T-1000 got shot: The sounds of lots of iron nails falling onto to the grounds make audiences experience how T-1000 is blowed into thousands of pieces.

Terminator

Terminator’s vision: The sound comes from Termovision. Gary had to find a balance between the rhyme of sounds that seem data being processed or canculated. When in this vision, the external sounds were still added such as music or chatting, not just the digit, make the scene more effective and realistic.

Environment

Metallic key sounds in Terminator 2: A lot of banging in all kinds of metal. The team recorded banging on long girders in various ways to make the sound resonate. To make one single metal hit, Gary mixed different piches of metal hits together until they matched.

The wind in the opening scene: from a crack of an open door to the main mix room at Skywalker sound.

The molten pit:
_The sound was made by compressed air into lots of mud and boiling sounds which were pitched down. Audiences can feel something hot, huge and thick bubble in the pit seems to ready to blow at any time.
_Gary and his recordist team visited a still mill to record elements to make this one. Sony 2000 R-DATs  was used and 7 hours of metal and machines were recorded.

Guns and Vehicles:

Guns: Gun shots were recorded with 1 Nagra and 2 R-DATs at Stembridge shooting range
_R-DATs was coupled with Sanken M-S mics.
_Nagra had Schoeps in one channel and a Neumann on the other.
_ Gary focused on the sounds of bullets hitting objects, not the sound of the gun itself.

Vehicles: from dirt bikes, motorbikes to SWAT vans were used to record, but mainly for suspension squeaks and running over boards, not for engine sounds.

FOLEY AND DIALOGUE:
_ All of the incedential  movements were replaced. For instance,the whole scene of Sarah getting out of the straps in her hospital bed is nothing but foley. The leather creaks on Terminator’s jacket are also foley. Lexicon 2400, a TV studios main device, and Lexicon 480 were used.
_ADR: Most of the breathing and 70% of dialogue is ADR.

Music:  Thrilling and fast spacing scores make Terminator 2 dynamic. Traditional violin sounds were not used to lead the fighting scenes. Brad Fiedel and Gary Summers worked together to enhance the tension of scenes

Further thought:

I have no idea that to create a sound element in a movie can take so much effort and time until I accidentally watched the video above on Youtube. For instance, a single shot gun sound in the hospital scene was created by mixing 3 different sounds together. I think terminator 2 would not achieve such a enormous success without the key element: sound. The movie won 2 Academy awards for best sound mixing and best sound editing. The sound makes this epic movie realistic. Even it was made 13 years ago, I always feel like I am living in it every time I watch. You can try to mute the sound next time you watch something, you will know what I mean. No matter how great the visual effect is, most of audiences will likely say : “Um hmm, It’s not real. It’s a movie” .

FREFERENCE

1. Kenny,T 2000, Sound for picture: Film sound through the 1990s, Hal Leonard Corporation
2. Carlsson,SE, Sound design of Terminator 2, Film sound, viewed 14 March 2016, <http://www.filmsound.org/t2/>

“He wanted to die with me and I dreamed of being lost forever in his arms.”

Our group’s objective of this studio is to make a short film. We are required build everything from scratch basically based on this prompt.  This reflective report will show how our group formed the early stage of the film. The report also addresses my individual process as well as raises problems that need resolution.

I got a romantic feeling when we received the prompt. This sounds like a quote in the classic ‘Romeo and Juliet’. In fact, this prompt was taken from ‘Badlands’ (1973) directed by Terrence Malick. According to Mehring (1990),” If your screenplay does not emerge from your inner need to know; to express; to share; and to integrate, it will lack vitality and significance”,  I came up with the idea of a woman artist who is experiencing her final moment after fighting with a deadly disease for a long period of time. ‘Death’ in a form of a man is always with her. However, the concept was too broad and complex. Then we shrink the idea to a smaller scale: a little girl and ‘Death’ in a shape of a little boy. We tried to explore the theme “friendship and death” which is feeding on the innocence and carefree nature of a child as well as illustrate the contrast between her and Death as a severe matter.  A lot of discussion has been through and we decided that our work will focus on exploring a friendship of a child and her imaginary friend.

Stella, an 8 year-old girl, takes us on an emotional journey as she faces a social issue at her early age. Instead of making friend and playing with other children, she forms a closed friendship with Sam, an invisible boy. The positive concept of imaginary friend is not a common theme in many mediums.  The notion of society’s abuse and corruption on children are explored by William Blake. “Drop dead Fred” is a great example of a character using her imaginary friendship as a coping mechanism although the protagonist is an adult.

Stella’s imaginary friendship is not similar to a role-playing game as children normally play. She actually believes that Sam is a real figure who always there to play with her. Caplan and Caplan’s (1974) describes “playing” as an opportunity for children to create a world where they are in control. At this stage, it is appear that our Stella is facing a social issue. As a result, she creates Sam as a solace and a way to distract herself the reality. Sam will be used as a metaphor for her own emotional progress. Sam is also an obstacle to her real life. Importantly, how we will portrait Sam is still need further discussion. According to Harter and Chao (1972), a typical girl’s imaginary friend is usually vulnerable and incompetent. The matter is that weather we should portrait Sam as a typical one or not.

In addition to Stella and Sam, we also have Stella’s mother and a neighbour girl who is as old as our protagonist. Without the presence of a man in the house will convey that Stella’s mother is a single mom. This is possible to give audiences a hint that Stella forms an imaginary form because of lacking fatherhood. The problem here is that we have not figured out what situation will make her worries about her daughter’s imaginary friendships. In their text, Tracy and Maria (2014) says that typical parents have neutral to positive feelings about their children’s invisible friend and might see them as a sign of intelligence.

In terms of cinematography, we have already had in mind a direction of how we shoot the film. As can be seen from other group’s dark and heavy theme, we want our work to have a warmer and brighter visual. There is not much commotion with a theme like ours, so our film will rely heavily on good aesthetics. Lynn Ramsey and Daren Aronofsky did give us a big influence regarding to movements, space and compositions. We will take advantage of a various filming techniques to draw attention of the audience to our main character Stella as she will be in focus. This will include close ups and point of view shots to reiterate her emotions as well as unique perspective of a child.

Another vital element to any film which is often overlooked is sound design. As David Lynch states that at least 50% of a film is sound. Ned (2011) also mentions in his article that sound in film is the element which constantly persuades the audience that they are actually witnessing a particular scene. For instance, in “Apocalypse now” (1979) by Walter Murch, a lively jungle and helicopter appear in a soldier’s mind like he is actually there. Sound can add a great deal to a scene and is an essential part of a film. It injects a whole brand new dynamic to a scene and a higher level at which audience can interact with. The reaction to the same moving images can be greatly changed depending on the sound element and can convey massage we want. I totally agree with Randy Thom in his article as he said that: “Great sound design is not something that you apply cosmetically to an existing piece of work”. Regarding to techniques, I am working on how to create a 3D sound environment to bring the audience to where our story happens. We will not use ADR for the dialogue due to our low budget and the mood swinging nature of children. We will mainly record dialogues at the location to capture the unique emotions of the child actors. A variety of sound effects such as household activities will be used to give the film a realistic sense. We also consider using music with dramatic theme for our work.

Last but not least is the location for the film. I realise that location does impact greatly on films. Shooting and recording quality will rely heavily on the location. The best option for now is Alex friend’s house with country home style in Essendon. Our main problem so far has been logistics because our group does not have our means of transportation which means we might have to travel a long distance with bulky equipment.

In short, at this stage, there are many puzzles we have to solve. At least we have ready had a vision what our product will look like.

Reference cited:

• Mehring, M 1990, ‘Theme’ in Screenplay : a blend of film form and content, Focal Press, Boston, pp. 221-230.
• Gleason, Tracy R., and Maria Kalpidou. “Imaginary Companions and Young Children’s Coping and Competence.” Social Development 23, no. 4 (2014): pp.820-39.
• Patall, Erika A., Sylvester, Breana J., & Han, Cheon-woo. (2013). The role of competence in the effects of choice on motivation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 50,pp. 27-44.
• Ned D,  “The Spirit of Music” in Art. (2003); In Modern Painters.  Vol.: 16 No.: 2 June p. 68 – 71
• Caplan, Frank, & Caplan, Theresa. (1974). The power of play. Garden City, N.Y: Anchor Press.

To be honest, this is the weirdest short film I have ever watched. In general, this small piece is about a nightmare of a little girl. She is somehow is obsessed by the alphabet song. I am very impressed how David Lynch transformed such a sweet song into a horrified nightmare.

What I learned from this small work is that there is no limit to imagination in film making. Do not restrain yourself in a small cage. Think beyond what you see or what you already know.

Furthermore, the short film could not scare me without the great use of sound design. David Lynch pushes the audiences to their limit with simple sound but with high frequency. It makes me feel like the girl is screaming in her own dream. The visual is similar to the old time horror movie such as “The evil dead”. I find this type of  effect is rather gross than scary.

I always pay attention to sound design in media products, but “Alphabet” still surprised me. I find it possible to create a strong soundscape with just simple sound pieces. This will help me much in my later project. I will look into more of David Lynch’s works to see how he manipulates sound to enhance the whole story.

Reference cited:

David Lynch The Alphabet, video, Matteo Pini 2014, 6 February, viewed 8 March 2016, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ_t1eOAipo>.

Everything is just like in a blink of my eyes, but so many things happened. I took this media 1 with a big “zero”. I do not know how to analyses an academic material. I do not know how to operate a camera or edit a movie clip. Even my English was still very limited. However, look at me now. I believe that I have improved a lot.

During the time when I was working on Project Brief 1 and 2, I thought that I would change my major next semester. I was overwhelmed by the weight of the course. I felt lost, I felt bored, but something inside of me told me to keep going.

At first I did not understand why I had to write those blogs. It seemed to be meaningless to me. Writing about my lectures and tutorials is a requirement for the blogs. The problem is that most of the time I did not get what the teachers were talking about. I kept on wondering why. Was it because my English was too bad? No, not bad at all. It was limited, but it was not that bad. Fortunately, I have realized what I lacked recently: I need to a reason when I do something seriously and emotion. I know that a professional does not rely too much on emotion. Therefore, I will have to get use to balancing my emotion and cognition.

Back there, when I still worked as a bartender, I felt strong emotions at every drinks I made. I also began at the bottom, but I improved so fast because of the word “passion”. Personally, I felt like our most of the lectures missed the element of “emotion”. I could not write a reflection right after other students. I need to go home and gather everything to analyse every pieces of information so that I can think about it.

Time went by, little by little, I started to feel more. May be I just need time to adapt all of those things. I try to think critically about the media world  in which I am living with different aspects. Zombie is big example for my point. Before this semester, I considered zombie is just horrified and disgusting, but why they are so popular. That question was hanging around my head until I use the skills from media course to peel its ugly cover. The more I read about it, the more I realize its true nature. From there, I think every other of media product is the same. Most of the time, there are implication or social comment that is hidden in an artefact waiting for me to uncover. I have to study, observe and notice actively if I want to catch the feeling and become a real media practitioner in the future.

In terms of technical skills, I obtained so many valuable practical experiences in a short time, especially thanks to Project Brief 4. I have learned how to work individually and in a team from this project. To create a great media product, I suppose collaboration, communicating and responsibility are the 3 key elements.

Here are the links to my 5 favourite entries to present what I have learned so far:

1. Project Brief 4

2. Post-modern zombie as allegorical and iconographic figure

3. Modern zombie as a global warning

4. Zombies in the real world

5. Terminator 2 sound analysis