Week 4’s readings were surprisingly sciencey for what I thought was just a pure media course. But this diversity of this course has been delightful so far anyway. Film is made up of audio and visual stimuli (unless of course you went to Shrek in 4D at movie world*)

Because vision is our primary sense we perceive EVEN AUDIO through our eyes first. So behold the curious McGurk Effect!

ADD MORE FROM READING HERE

Back to the film side of it, a brilliant example of how visual and audio can work together to create a compelling effect is the sound edit in Jurassic Park (1997) directed by Steven Spielberg. After her daughter is attacked, her moth screeches. The soundtrack also swells with high-pitched whiney violins which help blend the screaming. This sound slowly changes into a train screech, as it cuts to the man yawning. We immediately join the sound to his open mouth as if he is screaming, even though the sound doesn’t how he would scream normally. This shows that visuals dominate our film experience, but sound can be used to trick us.

*shrek in 4D: I’m terrified of horror movies so seeing the haunted house short film was borderline torture. The 4d aspect was quite refreshing literally as we were splashed with water when goop was shown on screen. And a sadistic tickle device under our chairs set off when we were shown creatures on screen.