When we ventured out to make our first film, we didn’t think much about sound. At the time it seemed superfluous as we believed that story and visual were most important. So we focused on those aspects of film-making and relegated our sound efforts to nothing more than a shotgun mic affixed to the camera and a wireless lav crudely clipped to our subject. Our feelings have since changed and sound has become as important to our film-making process as story and visuals; you cannot have one without the other. And so when we think of a telling a story, we think in terms of visuals and sound working in tandem to create a texture that informs the viewer/listener of setting, character, and tone. Below is an elegant example of the use of sound design by Henrik Hanson.
Listen to the way that Everynone used sound to describe moments.
http://vimeo.com/8189067
The thing about great sound design is that it isn’t obvious. It doesn’t pronounce itself to you; rather it becomes a part of the larger picture, like a brushstroke. If you think about it, films can only touch two of the five sensations: sight and sound. Until technology finds a way to let us taste, smell and touch film, we’re pretty much stuck with using our eyes and ears exclusively. And so that sensation has to be so vivid as to transport us to that place, letting us feel and understand what the characters are experiencing. Great sound design in motion pictures does that. What I love about “collecting sound”, as I like to call it, is that I’m discovering things my senses have never paid attention to before. Like when we were documenting a struggling local Men’s clothing store and listening to how the hangers scraped across the racks. Or when the window dresser folded and hammered the pants and shirts onto the mannequins with such exactitude. We’ve played around with a bit of purposeful sound design in some of our client work too. Watch the first 30 seconds of the following video, in which we used sound design to evoke the memory of a Georgetown professor’s first day on the job 20 years ago. Listen for the bells, the planes that fly overhead, the sound of driving through Georgetown streets, walking down the hall, entering an old classroom, writing on the blackboard. They’re all part of the texture of the Georgetown experience and so we tried to integrate that into an introduction that would stimulate that feeling of being there for the first time.
