Sound Design Workshop - Semester 2 Begins

SEMESTER 2 began last week, and it started properly with a sound design workshop on Tuesday. I had done similar things before in the 1st year general foundation art and media course 4 years ago as part of a Time Based Art module over 6 days (including shooting and editing footage) and have since used my skills learned occasionally.

Myself, Ross Douglas and Sarah Gillespie took a clip from Megamind and created sounds for a robot stomping through a city, for example. For this we used a gate crashing, dropping a rubber tile thing from a park, standing on cereal, etc, etc, to create the effect along with some changes within ProTools. It worked incredibly well we thought and we completed the first few seconds of the clip with a feeling of achievement.



I will upload the clip once it is on the net.

Reflection on Practice: One thing I feel about sound, from a filmmaking point of view, based on a comment made by the tutor exclaiming that visuals and sound go 50-50, is that it is very minimal and overwhelmed by the wealth of visual storytelling techniques. Some people say it is 50-50, but I don't see how. Filmmaking is visual storytelling. Film is founded on visuals. Initially film was silent. Radio is founded in sound. As in, film is still a film without sound, however a film without visuals is the radio or a podcast and is no longer a film. Even radio and podcasts don't have the ability by themselves to be filmic.

Visual storytelling is vast. Sizes and placements of objects or characters, angles of the camera, movement, balanced shots, cuts - jump, transtions - dissolve, compositing things together which aren't possible to film... The list goes on and on and on, far and beyond this mild attempt. However, after this workshop it appears that in a couple of hours you can fake sounds very roughly which are effective only to add to the visuals which took months to produce meticulously. This is simply because the sound is syncronised with the timing of the visual (and the timing was produced primarily for the visual to work, not the sound). There is no way that sound can demand a 50 per cent importance in the filmmaking process. It is merely another important element in filmmaking, and I am not saying it is not important - every element of filmmaking is important. It is larger than a dissolve or jump cut, but minuscule in comparison to the visuals and the process of producing them.

When sound is used best is when it is designed in the writing process, such as dialogue or a character hearing a sound from off camera, or associating a sound with one part of the story, for example. That is why I believe in filmmaking, every element needs to be considered to make a well-made and thorough picture, and sound is one of those many, many things.