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.

1 comment:

  1. I was at that demo too! The music and sound effects definitely make a huge difference.

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