Monday, March 31, 2014
At the Museum of the Moving Image
The Museum of the Moving Image provides an interesting
perspective on movies and their production. At first I felt that the magic of
movies was being spoiled by the reality of how those amazing effects are actually
created. I wanted to cover my ears, shut my eyes, and flee before anything else
was ruined for me, probably knocking over exhibits and causing a lot of trouble
as I clumsily exited. Though this would have been an interesting story to
recount in the future, I slowly came to realize just how interesting it is to
discover how magic is created through people’s imagination. One demo that I found
particularly interesting was the one on sound effects. My little tour group was
shown part of the scene from Titanic where the ship is sinking which was played
several different times. The amount of work that went into a few minutes of
footage in just the sound production was astonishing. The limited amount of
dialog for that scene was not shot with the video at all, but rerecorded by the
actors in a studio and when it was played on its own with the scene it seemed
awkward and out of place. Each layer of sound by itself was strange and
revealed a new level of detailed work contributed to the production. The sound
of a body falling onto a deck turned out to be a chair with four sand bags
being knocked over and the suction of a porthole almost sucking a character
through turned out to be the sound effect of wind combined with a lion’s roar
played backwards. A gun with the silencer on helped create snapping cords and
almost nothing that you hear in the clip was what it seemed to be. Until the
clips were are played together didn’t even seem to go with the video. It was...ear opening? Sounds lame but the truth is it made me pay greater attention to the complexity of sound.
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I was at that demo too! The music and sound effects definitely make a huge difference.
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