This week we're looking at time stretching. In a lot of films, music videos and short clips you'll see things in slow motion and we can do just the same with music or sounds. The start of this sound clip was created from two sounds, white noise and a double bass, both slowed down so you get this grainier texture thats pulled out. Later on I use wind noises for the landing (recorded by pro game sound designer Barney Oram - http://www.barneyoramgameaudio.co.uk/) slow down, EQ'd and overdriven to create a kind of 'fire' sound. This I imagined to be jets out of the bottom of a spaceship/time machine to slow it down enough for landing. Throughout the journey there is added background hiss to try and emulate the natural noises you would hear, in the middle section I am using it to highlight the silence of traveling through space (see last week's blog on silence if you haven't read already!) but its also used in the beginning to hear the 'hums' of electronic machines in use.
Over this brief 50 seconds you hear about 40 layers of different sounds to provide texture, and it's hardly sounding thick, so just imagine how many layers you hear when you see films like Star Trek! This week's tip; you can forge sounds out of anything, including white noise, you just need clear vision of the sound in your head!
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Over the next 10 weeks i’ll be giving away some (maybe my best!) tips for putting sounds to images, this week I’m focusing on film as its a favourite of mine, but next week, who knows?! Where to start in the made world of sound? From soaring string lines, to heavy bass that rattles around the cinema (or your parents front room!) when your playing your favourite film. When people think film sound and music they think huge orchestras in massive halls but actually, my first tip is to know how to use silence. Silence being defined as “complete absence of sound”. In this clip in the popular film Batman Begins there is not music, but a huge emphasis is put upon foley, the sounds that you would hear if you were stood right in the scene. AT 0:20 you can hear the detail put into him putting his receiver into the helm, with the reverb (room noise) sounding like they are in fact, in an underground cavon, which is exactly where they are! the first minute or so is accompanied by music but then the part I want you to pay attention to is at 1:08, the whole scene is just diagetic (on screen) noise, theres no big guitar riffs, or fancy cello lines, there’s the occasional stab to accent surprise but the tension in the scene itself is built up with silence. A lack of sound. Its this that is important, Silence can be implied, by using indicators, the whilstling at 2:15 and the footsteps almost as loud as his voice show that its silent. Maybe the best composers know when to keep quiet. Or maybe the budget didn’t just extend far enough! This Film was of course scored by Hans Zimmer. The second clip is is from eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, in which Jim Carey plays a man (spoiler alert) who has lost his memory. This is so key to the point i’m going to make because the music directly relates to this. The blankness of his mind is mirrored by the fact there is no sound. Only outside noise, there’s literally silence when it starts, have a watch, just the first few seconds. Now we’ve only looked at the use of complete silence, there are many other ways to add emphasis, for example you could gradually take out all the low frequency noises so that when your big scene with a huge explosion comes in the whole room shakes, and its juxtaposed again a lack of bass, in the same way you could do the same with the high frequencies, or maybe you want to loose some of the instruments that take up the vocal range of the music, so that speech can cut through clearly.
Again, in the opening of this scene we know form indicators that there is silence, because you can loudly hear the car door's opening and closing in the first few seconds before music comes in. Naturally those sounds would have appeared much more far away, we can hear form the loudness of bass frequencies in the door closing that it is perceived as close proximity, these indicators of silence are what makes the silence bolder or 'louder', if you can imagine that! The phrase as quiet as a mouse means that its silent, because you can hear a quiet mouse making noise, so the rest of the room must be quiet. This is not actually silence if you can hear the mouse, but it implies that it is because its so quiet. So, this weeks tip? Use silence and sounds so they can compliment each other, leave breaks to make your music sing, and use indicators to make your silence more gripping. |
Ben WatersRecently started doing a lot of sound of image stuff in downtime, please, take a look! ArchivesCategories |