A Sound Fails In The Forest Where Nobody Hears ItThis is a progress report, and another call for revolution. Some of you may have read my original confessions a few years ago. My main gripe was, and still is, that virtually no movie Directors, Producers, or Editors take sound seriously as a collaborator in the film making process. We’ve made a little progress, though, which I’ll mention later. For me, taking ‘Sound Design’ seriously means essentially one thing: allowing sound to influence creative decisions in the other crafts. If sound (basically music and sound effects - though I resist the idea that there is a clear boundary between the two) is merely a decoration to be applied to a predetermined product, then it isn’t collaborating on anything, and the likelihood of sound being an organic part of the whole experience is near zero. At the beginning of a project the Director will probably tell you, the Sound Designer/Composer, that is extremely important to the film. He’s being sincere, but what he really means is something like the following - “The sound in this movie has to be great. I don’t have time to put much energy into it myself, and I didn’t learn much about the creative aspect of film sound in film school where I got the impression that sound work is a series of boring technical operations you don’t understand unless you’re a physics major, but I’m hiring you because you are supposed to be a genius. You’re so brilliant (I hope) and have access to such hi-tech gadgets (I pray) that the track will miraculously, without benefit of actual collaboration, (no time for figuring out what it might mean to let collaborate) fill the gaps left by the visual effects and dialogue.” What passes for collaboration will usually consist of you, the Composer/Sound Designer, being handed the Editor’s temp track and asked to make a 5.1 channel version of it which is somehow basically identical to the original, yet simultaneously transcends it, makes breathe, and fills whatever gaps have been left by the other crafts. Sure, we can do that. But it won’t be what it could be. And no, it will not, has not ever, saved the picture. On a little less cynical note, some progress is being made on the path towards collaboration. I can give you one very good example from the movie Contact. Bob Zemeckis is one of those rare Directors who sees the value in allowing sound to do what the other major crafts do: affect other crafts. There is a sequence in Contact when the Jodie Foster character is ‘flying’ through a tunnel in space-time. | When I saw the early experiments, done by the visual effects people I noticed that there were typically ten to twenty ‘objects’ of roughly equal size flying through the frame and around her at any one time. I knew- that if we cut a sound for every one of those objects, and panned those sounds through the frame and into the surrounds, we would wind up with so much happening in every speaker at all times that we’d get no sense of movement and no articulation: pink noise. I mentioned this to Bob. It made sense to him so he asked the people doing the visuals to design them so that the audience would tend to focus on one or two objects at a time flying by the camera. I don’t tell you this in order to make myself seem brilliant. There were no doubt lots of better suggestions I could have made if I’d had the brains to come up with them. The reason I say it is that I believe we as sound people should encourage each other to consider the possibility that our collaborative suggestions may, and sometimes should, be taken seriously and acted upon by members of other ‘departments’. Mere sound people, unless they happen to be high school buddies with the Director, (a status I can’t claim with Mr Zemeckis) would typically never dare to make a suggestion about the way anything should LOOK in the film, even if it has a direct bearing on their sound work. That seems ridiculous to me. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that there is an individual, the Director, who gets to determine, to the degree physically possible, what the movie is going to look and sound like. I hate working for committees. And obviously it isn’t appropriate for everybody working on a film to be constantly tugging the Director’s sleeve with suggestions. That said... While it’s considered entirely appropriate for the Production Designer and Director of Photography to make suggestions about diverse aspects of the movie, it flirts with professional suicide for the Composer or Sound Designer to do the same. In a further perversion of the old idea of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, it’s assumed that because the ‘visual’ preceded the ‘aural’ in film history then sound should forever simply follow the picture in every respect. The best Directors of the last generation, people like Scorcese, Coppola, Kubrick, Bertolucci, Lucas and Spielberg know this is a false idea, but even they aren’t sure how to deal with it. How do you treat sound as an equal collaborator? There are holes in every rule. I hate rules. But here, Sound Guys (notice nobody ever says “camera guy”), are some, let’s say, ‘necessary conditions’ for using the power of sound in ‘your’ (YOUR) movie. |
