Evaluation (Sound Director)

Alex Reader Evaluation

My position in the filmmaking was the sound director, our initial idea was to make a film Noir/Gangster movie, so a sub-genre of noir. We wanted to create a British gangster film with techniques of noir. For example at the start of the film I used the music genre known as smooth jazz, I used this for two reasons. The first reason is that in the film “Sunset Boulevard” you hear smooth jazz in “Norma’s” house and in other old and original noir films jazz seems to be a good choice in music since it suits the mood of a noir film; quite, apprehensive, slowly progressing. These features are in both the genre of music and the genre of film. The second reason I used smooth jazz is that the instrumentation is key when trying to convey to the audience what genre(s) you are presenting, ours was Noir/Gangster and in films such as “The Godfather parts 1, 2, and 3” you can clearly hear smooth jazz being a consistent theme of music in those films. Therefore to make the genre obvious at the start of the film I had to choose a genre of music that fitted both genres’s of film.
We also used other atmospheric sound such as sound that creates a tight, apprehensive and uncomfortable atmosphere. In the scene where “Bills” goes to the toilet in the bar restroom and a member from another gang is creeping up behind him is extremely tense because we used music and percussion to create an uneasy effect. For example when the other gang member is opening the door and starts walking out the shaker starts on the second and fourth beat of the bar which is made dominant by the light drums you can hear underneath the accented beats. As he walks closer to him distinct drums are heard, the drums as well as the shakers are both accented on the second and fourth beats then as he gets even closer the drums are accented on every beat of the bar building to a crescendo when he finally grabs him round the neck and pulls him away where the volume of the drums and shakers are lowered and reveals the killer walking into shot with no atmospheric sound to be heard. We found that building the volume, dynamics, and instrumentation up slowly matched the tension seen in the shot.
Another major part of making the sound work in this film was to get the diegetic and non-diegetic sound rite. Diegetic sound is any sound presented that is real in the world of the story in the film. The hard part for our group was that the sounds we were looking for were very specific to the place where we filmed them, for example we needed to create the sound of a pool ball being potted. So I looked for sounds, which related to a heavy, metal ball and found the sound effect on a pinball machine’s ball being potted in the machine and we tried it and it worked perfectly, although at first we did have to lower the volume since it did over power the voices greatly. Other examples of diegetic sound we used were the sounds of car doors being shut and also, running water, phone ring tones, outside noises such as crickets and traffic to set the mood of a late night and footsteps which “Ed” synchronised the length, the timing, and the volume of each step to fit the character on screen to make the diegetic sound believable to the audience.
As I mentioned before we had to use atmospheric sound as well as music that suited the genre of the film, these are all examples of non-diegetic sound that we used, as well as the atmospheric sound I have already mentioned we have had problems with it. For example we are trying to create a British gangster/noir film but I took inspiration from a new film called “44 inch chest” with Ray Winston and John Hurt. In the trailer for that film the British gangster film genre is made clear by a slow build up and then the music moves into a funk beat. We tried this funk beat in our film and to be honest it looked horrible, it didn’t fit the mood, you couldn’t recognise a clear genre at all, and it didn’t convey and help in plot development which music should do in film. Therefore we decided to use British modern day garage/drum and bass music in the scene when he is walking to the car, this music helped to illustrate the story and progress the narrative by showing the audience that it is building up to the final scene where the gangs will clash in one final fight, the music is accented with heavy beats that represents with each beat the gang are getting closer to the final fight and it also forces the audience to get excited, eager, and fired up for the last scene of the film.