Why do so many people like watching movies? Apart from the fact it is a combination of so many arts, it has the power to transport us into some faraway place in the world or an altogether different century in the past. It makes us vicariously experience the movie character’s life. Sound effects are one of the many elements in movie which help in making this possible. This post celebrates the role of sound in movies.
Sound may not appear to be as significant as background music or dialogues. But without it the experience is not the same. It’s like a side kick to a hero in a movie. Like a bass guitar in music. Like a papad u crave for along with the thali.. like a paint to the red bricks of a fifty year old campus with great infrastructure and architecture (yes i suck at metaphors)
Sound in our Desi movies
Heard this anecdote from a prof in an Intellectual property rights class. A Hindi film maker (i think it was Ramesh sippy) during a movie shoot, canceled a shot where in a lady pours Tea into a cup. He said that the tea was not hot enough and ordered to bring hot tea. When the dumbfounded assistants told him that it was film and temperature cannot be captured in it, the director reasoned that a fresh hot tea makes a very distinct sound which a cold tea cannot!! In an another instance during the shoot of Mughal E Azam, there is a scene where Emperor Akbar throws a huge number of pearls on the floor after a dance by madhubala (anarkali). At that time fake pearls were used to create the sound. The director K.Asif grimaced and said "Mazaa nahi aaya. The sound of real pearls hitting the marble stone is something else and this is not the same." So he ordered huge quantities from a place Basra in Iraq to create the scene. Film makers are mad (The whole paragraph is copy righted to the prof :D)
Talking of mad film makers, Ram Gopal varma is one guy who has great sound effects in his movies. He was the pioneer in live recording of various sound effects like cars tyres squeaking, fire crackling etc in telugu films. Before him, a traditional fight in a telugu film only had dishum dishum. After that we at least a got a better replacement in variations of “thuddd” and whiplash sounds when a hero grimaces and punches the villain.
The subconscious effect
In chasing sequences, breathing sound, the rustling of clothes and heartbeat sounds are frequently used when a person is shown running. This intensifies the feeling you would get and puts us in the situation of the victim and makes you feel as if you are being chased.
In the movie Dark Knight the Batmobile's sound was achieved by recording big race boat engines. But what is interesting is that large animal roars and growls were also added to it to make it more effective. Something similar is done by the same guy Richard king, in the movie Inception. In the scene where Cobb and Adrianne sit at a coffee shop and the dream disintegrates around them, to create the sound effects he mixed the normal explosion sounds of the debris with moans of people, whale sounds and other animal sounds. The objective was to subconsciously create fear in the minds of the audience.
One more amazing example. A young boy is looking at his braces in the mirror and suddenly the braces creep out of his mouth and start entangling him. To create the sound for this the sound designer recorded thin wires scraping across certain rough surfaces mixed with sand shuffling in a wooden box and as an undertone he added the sound of a dentist’s drill. His reasoning was that along with the background music and other sounds nobody will consciously realize the sound of the dentist’s drill but it will arouse the subconscious fear which is in all of us could have been embedded in as children as we see the drill coming towards our mouth.
Innovation
In the movie Saving private Ryan there is no music throughout the whole beach landing section of the soldiers. Just through the raw sound of bullets zinging by in air and water, clanging on the helmet (and thudding on the forehead of course), the director managed to make us sick in the gut. The filmmakers found a weapons collector who owned original examples of all the personal weapons seen in the movie, and those weapons were used to make the sounds. Some people say they found themselves ducking from bullets and smelled gun powder while watching the movie in surround sound !!
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| Guess his last words |
What if you have no reference point to create Sound? For example, how do we know what a dinosaur sounded like? This is where you can have a lot of fun. In Jurassic Park the growl of the Dinosaur is actually a mix of several different animal growls and the grinding noise of a power saw. Click here to listen to it. You can clearly make out the power saw sound at the end. Similarly in Raiders of the Lost Ark in one of the opening scenes, Indiana Jones is fleeing a runaway boulder. That noise was actually the sound editor's Honda Civic rolling down his driveway!!
On an ending note, because we get so used to some sounds, silence and the anticipation of certain sounds are used to great effect in suspense movies. As Alfred Hitchcock puts it “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
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