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Male: Cinema has never been silent. The movie image has always pulsed and danced to the oral architecture of sound. Without sound we have nothing, but with sound you have anything.
Male: It is kind of artificial distinction to say here are the images here are the sounds. This is not how people see the world. They see the world as a unified sensory experience, which involves all these things together as a bestowed.
Male: It took many years to embrace synchronized sound on film, but the emotional design of an oral superstructure for cinema is its older cinema itself. Without sound, the images cannot be strong. But tradition production development processes, devalues sound. Sound is all too often neglected in the script, not considered in the story board and ignored in post production until the picture is locked and sealed.
Male: Sadly, sound only does take place until after the script is broken down in a traditional process. This way sound is extracted from the screen play rather than composed into it. The sound is on becomes a process of interpretation not a real process of writing or crafting a cinematic medium.
Male: But there is an opportunity here to embed sound ideas into the script to write sound ideas into the screen plan, hear them in the screenplay to let those sound ideas profoundly impact upon in story in narrative and character.
Male: The cinema experience does not happen on the screen. It happens in the mind of the viewer. Writing sound, writing the oral architecture of the action allows you to get your story, your experience up, off the page, out of the screen and directly into the mind of the viewer.
Male: It is amazing what your eyes will put up with. It is amazing what viewers will tolerate. They will see through crossing the line, they will tolerate shotty camera work and shaky cam, even poor focus and terrible composition. But give a dirty great pop through your audio.
Male: There is a night connection we have with sound is not something that should be confined to just technical production of sound. Let sound work for you, because if you are using images to tell everything about your story then you are working to hard because there is nothing that you can do with the picture that cannot be done more efficiently with the sound.
Female: The sound is on its roll is to keep increasing the stakes for the audience all the time. It should be always rising not in volume or it is not always volume and it is not always density. It may be that it drops off but it is interesting and exciting for the audience in a new and different way always increasing throughout the film.
I have been involved early in the process, but sometimes it is not early enough. Actually, one of my love is the idea of being able to be involved in the casting and the casting from what that does person voice sound like perspective. Because I kind of think that is all part of the oral landscape. If the character is listening then the audience is going to be listening and then the sound track is going to be far more satisfying and engaging. And, I would leave space for those things to happen and I believe moments where you are not getting the information any other way than through the sound.
Well, I just see the soundtrack as like a thick earth’s crust with mountains, rivers, valleys, and moments of complete desolation with wind only or dense rainforest of jungle. And, they are about the time base part of the film making process like when do we want to travel to those areas.
I tend to go, what is the theme here, what is the sound of that? The thing about sound is that it is unlike a lot of the other tools in film making it sort of like a glue tech that you can pull out and you can stretch back in and so where a lot of them is very precise, and structuring is very precise and the frame is a very precise thing. What is happening in the sound is it is actually making this sort of sculpted amorphous mass that travels through.
I can think of some great films where the characters have a sound that tell us man. I can think of getting square diving wind and there is stone where ever he walked, “flip, flop, flip, flop.” I can think of the on the well for example, it turned out within the script which is fantastic. Vera John is a fantastic writer in that way. This that she has leap and so every way she walks she had been clubbed foot and she limped and you could hear it coming and so those moments that people are walking on and off screen becomes moments of story telling and pain sometimes because of the sound.
Male: Traditional cinematic process has divided and broken up the elements of cinema – script separate from cinematograpy, sound separate from image.
Male: With the digital age both allows and demands that we engage with more diverse influences than that.
Male: Why should we not start with sound? Why should not sound influence narrative? Why should the screenplay only be visual?
Male: Writing sound just as writing vision is about writing in action. The principles of “show do not tell” still apply although they are less obvious. Take this scene, a girl is being chased on a dark corridor, simply dramatic but what it makes it powerful and effecting to the viewer is the sound, but how do you write that sound? The screenplay could read, “Jenny runs down the corridor, the concrete walls echo sharply.” But this is telling not showing, it is obstructed sound it is not attach to something visual and tangible in action.
“Jenny runs down the corridor, the sound of her bare feet slapped on the concrete floor with sharp echo.” Hear the sound of the moan, it is not just told but shown. Shown linked to an action. More importantly, it plays right into the mind of the viewer. We will be able to hear that sound through personal connection. The form of urgency happens on the page but the latter happens of the mind of the viewer.
Most all screenwriters write the vision, detailed visual action as it plays out on the screen. It is very rare for sound to be written in the same way. The sound to be embedded in the script itself as part of the creative conception.
Male: But there are new opportunities here. You have opportunities to write sound into the screen play and to hear those sounds as part of the process of writing and this simple shift can fundamentally change the way sound can impact upon character, upon story, and upon ideas.
Moreover, new cinematic forms such as gaming and machinima actually demand this consideration of sound as part of their design process, as their part of the construction of drama.
Male: In a game, where the game itself or whether it is a game engine from machinima, sound is built with a very different headspace. Sound is derived not from the composed timeline, but from where the sounds are placed in the environment. So in this way, writing the sound is about connecting sounds to spaces and environments rather than to moments in time. What this does is to mainly write sound into machinima and gaming scripts with an acute awareness of space, and design, and levels.
Male: The sound in computer gaming has to let you know the way that the hiss of a rattle snake lets you know that you really need to move your foot now.
Male: Tag your scenes with sound and then take them with the oral space of that scene and connect those sounds with mood with theme and character. Insert sounds themselves as guide, examples and illustrations and all those ideas right into the script and link those elements with the sounds and images of the screenplay.
Male: I hear things and those things have very necessary visual analogs. I mean self-evident visual analogues. I mean if you hear the sound of an explosion then there is a visual analog that goes with that, which is almost an imperative. It is all very easy really, it is how you compose it is how you bring all those different elements together. So, there is a kind of physics that determine the image that you going to have then put in place.
Male: Do not treat the sound as eyes and after thought. Use sound as a writing tool because there is nothing more efficient than a sound and there is nothing that cannot be said by a sound in an instant what might otherwise take a page of action.
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Male: It is high definition that puts on a website.
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