critical evaluative vlog
DO ENJOY THE FILM
The following is a reflective piece on my time as Sound Designer for the short film, Hiraeth (2019).
Hiraeth follows Arthur, a grieving widower forced to reckon with his past when his daughter threatens to sell their family home.
When I joined the crew, I leaned into Hiraeth's grounded, realistic tone by crafting a minimalist, diegetic soundscape.
You enjoy the film?
hope so, because with it in mind, my main objectives were:
To create a sense of intimate proximity between the characters and the audience through sound.
To create an emotive, diegetic soundscape true to the film's grounded aesthetic.
Due to costs, duvets were used in place of sound blankets.
Considering that the short film was just over 10 minutes, perhaps one of the key challenges for sound was to quickly establish our drama’s tone and steady pace. It became clear in pre production that we had a lot to pack into just 10 minutes but needed to allow for moments to breathe. Due to this, much of my research went into controlling the perception of time as well into clearly establishing the tone sonically.
From my pre-production assignment I looked into Greg Smith’s “Mood cue approach” to assist the audience into hopefully embracing the mood and tone of the film through sound. In said assignment I discuss how Smith suggests that by ‘redundantly’ serving the audience with ‘emotion markers’ one can elicit ‘brief moments of emotion to help maintain a ‘predisposition towards’ a certain mood (2003, pp. 44-45).
From Michel Chion I looked at techniques designed to control the perceived pace of the film through just diegetic sounds. Chion states that “a sound with a regular pulse tends to be predictable and creates less temporal animation”. This technique would help to establish to the audience the perception of a steady paced drama not afraid to linger in moments to take in its subtleties.
Consider these two approaches when watching the second video.
There was one instance where I had to depart from my second objective. Due to the nature of footage we managed to capture, our edit had to depart from the script (during the second act), in favour of a sequence between Arthur’s past and present. This did wonders for our story however it’s execution felt somewhat disjointed and unrelated, thus losing the impact of it’s revelations. I was unable to harmonies the sequence on purely diegetic sounds, and so I included a relevant slow-to-rise score that acted as a glue, encouraging the audience to look at these different scenes as one. While I was sad to momentarily depart from my objective, it was ultimately an easy decision for the sake of the film.
[550 words]
[Total Video Count: 5:30]
Bibliography
Chion, M. (2013). Audio-vision. Armand Colin.
Smith, G. (2007). Film structure and the emotion system. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sonnenschein, D. (2001). Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice and Sound Effects in Cinema. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions.
Filmography
Bone Tamahawk. (2015). [film] Directed by S. Zahler. America: Caliber Media Company.
Mother!. (2017). [film] Directed by D. Aronofsky. USA: Paramount Pictures
Nymphomaniac. (2013). [film] Directed by L. Trier. Denmark: Zentropa Entertainments.