In the 3rd “studio session” of this project, I’ve dedicated mainly to editing SFX. In this category, three main subgroups are edited separately but mixed all together. Those are:
- BACKGROUNDS/AMBIENCES (BG/AMB): sounds that build each scene’s location and consist entirely of elements, not scenes on screen. Some editors prefer to differentiate BGs from AMBs. The only thing that might differ is their visibility on camera.
- HARD FX (FX): realistic sounds that are driven by what’s on camera or action.
- SOUND DESIGN: elements that need to be created from scratch or a lot of processing to fulfil its function.
SOUND DESIGN
The only relevant sound design present in the film so far is the whisper. Nevertheless, I count the handy camera scenes as sound design, even though there isn’t a lot of processing, and it’s only a matter of layering the right effects.
It was pretty challenging for me to come with an idea for the whisper. First, I was working alongside the director to develop a scary sound full of layers and processing and chaos. It didn’t work well. It didn’t manage to fulfil the film’s ideas. There was too much conceptualisation towards that sound design, and in my opinion, Mario was too involved in the process. A movie is a product designed by seven departments, not only one – the director. I think that the idea of the Author film should’ve died in the last century. A film set is not a dictatorship. However, I’m not comparing that case with this one. Mario is a very ambitious audiovisual artist, and he wants to have a snippet of his ideas in all departments. The sound design for the whisper started to take a better form when I first decided to use this film for the assignment. This course is helping a lot to see the sound from different perspectives in a post-modernist way – decontextualising things from their original significance. It was the same thinking process behind the idea of doing silence design instead of sound design.
The whisper is a sound that brings terror with it. How can I show that with sound? Is it by offering terrifying sounds such as screams, roars, gore sounds? Or is it something that is created through time and by little glimpses that are presented sporadically? Gary Rydstrom, while talking about the sound design of the first T-Rex scene on Jurassic Park (1993), he explains why it is so iconical and effective:
“That scene where the T-Rex shows up is another example of planning a scene for sound. I think other directors would have had maybe a shocking moment where you see the T-Rex suddenly appear out of the blue. Hitchcock would say that you can either show the bomb under the table and have 5 minutes of tension or have the bomb explode as a surprise and get one second of shock. Spielberg did great by getting several minutes of tension because you knew what was coming and knew it because you heard it before you saw it. It was cleverly planned to scare people that way. It’s nice when movies think about sound ahead of time.”
I introduced the whisper that way. The whisper comes in the very first scene of the short: We see Emilio filming the forest with his handy camera, and before the scene ends, we get a glimpse of this human-like sound from within the forest. However, the way I came up with that sound was by accident. I went through my sound libraries, looking for a background that matched the handy camera scene ideas – exaggerated and very detailed. I found one good atmos of a pseudo tropical forest with a curious bird sound that recalls a common potoo. I dragged the clip into the scene, and when I listened back, the bird sound sounded haunting and frightening, and it looked like it was perfectly cut without even touching it.
I kept listening to that scene back and forward, and it sounded so good that I didn’t want to get rid of it. I decided to use it. Nevertheless, I need more repetitions of that same sound. By isolating it, I realised it sounded like my colleague Travis Yu, a vocal performer. We analysed the sound, and we agreed that we would recreate the sound through his voice and hopefully, that will function and work well within the final scene. Travis wanted the sound of the actual bird, but we couldn’t find it. They asked me: Why don’t you use the bird voice instead of mine. I don’t know how to answer them, but I will use their question in future experimentation.
Apart from that sound, I used two other elements. I liked the idea of minimal sound design already discussed before. So I used forest tones with maxed gain and accompanied with dozens of limiters that distorted the source completely. I’ve only needed a low pitch and high pitch from this experimentation, so I could later mix it creatively and enhance the story after the whisper’s appearance. In the scenes that proceed with the whisper’s appearance, I “crossfaded” both sounds with an HPF and LPF, resulting in an almost deaf and dead atmosphere. I later named the sounds dead atmos.