Task Five
Sound Effects
“300″ — End Title Sequence
- Watch in Low Quality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxkraEvMvP8
Composer’s Notes
I found this production extremely exciting and challenging. First off, I apologize for using another animation to score to, but I believe this created a chance for me to challenge myself further. I felt I would find scoring a sound effects track to a common scene in a film too easy. For example, my alternative choice for this task was to work with a live-action scene from within “The Island”, observing the visual stimuli of the environment, motion and interaction of the characters and narrative of the story would easily determine the sound effects I would use, because the scene was typical and familiar to me and my previous work. However, the end titles of “300″ not only being an epic feat of animation, but concludes the stunning film with a delicious sequence of imaginary silhouetted animations inspired by the film itself.
One of the main features of the animation is that the narrative is not obvious, there is clearly a battle being fought but there are no obvious characters, or movements of those characters, interactions of objects or obvious environmental ambiances. Many of the visuals are static, apart from three important elements. The blood splatter, the weapons, and the camera movements. Scoring sound effects (sound fx for short) for blood and spears is simple enough, but the change in perspective gave me an idea to use some non-diegetic sound fx.
During pre-production, I decided I would layer sound fx onto the animation, this way I would find it more organized to produce other elements and build up sections to create a more complex sound. I started by collecting and recording small sounds for certain elements and creating sets. These sets would be my palette of sounds that I would first place in Logic to run them through some initial DSP’s. The process of editing the original sounds altogether was to ensure they are all at the same volume, pan, sample rate, etc, and to also colour them with effects pluggins in a way that fitted my needs. After this, they would be exported and imported back into Logic, cut up and assembled once again on an unused track as my palette for that set of sounds.
The first elements of the animation to be scored were the non-diegetic features of the text movements and camera shifts. I wanted the sound of the text arriving on-screen to be heard, because these are titles after all, and I wanted the viewer to focus on the credits that are coming on-screen, at least initially. I also wanted this to be the same with the camera movements, there is too much movement not to have a sound with this visual element. I isolated the a selection of Bear moans and roars to be used with the text, after processing the sound heavily I managed to get a sound closer to, what I was aiming for, the sound of a ‘Iris’ door opening. For the camera shifts I used a palette of explosion sounds, each varying in length, velocity and magnitude. These were reversed and ran through some effects pluggins, including SubBass, Microphaser and the Michael Norris pluggin, Spectral Blurring to disguise the original sound but to give it a ‘windy’ sound and to ensure it was increasing in intensity without hearing the reverse effect.
Continuing further, the other elements including the blood splatter, spear swings and slow motion effects were quite simple, although often being non-diegetic, I felt adding sound fx were the viewer expects it is as much as a general requirement as adding sound fx where the narrative demands. That is not to say no sound fx can be placed where the viewer is not anticipating, but I feel with this production, to use a metaphor, the visual candy needed to taste as good as it looked.
The other element that requires some explanation as it might not be so obvious is down to the crowd roaring sound effects. Simple at first, however, there were a few things to consider. The first being that I had one original mono sound file that was 20 seconds long from my library. In addition, the crowd in the animation often seems to change in density as the camera shifts it’s perception in, out and around the area. The source of the shout and screams, it would seem is coming from all around, but I did not have 30-odd separate stereo sounds to work with. In order to achieve some sort of realistic effect to this problem, I double-tracked the original file after ensuring it was now in stereo with mild reverb effects. Then pitched the second of the tracks about half an octave down from the first track. Finally, and most complex, the primary crowd sound fx was given a Stereo Spread and Direction Mixer pluggin. I experimented with automation on both pluggins, in particular the Spread setting from the Direction Mixer and the Upper and Lower Intensity from the Stereo Spread. My aim was to cut off and curl frequencies from the sound effect so that the listener would hear the sound move as the camera moves, creating that all important metaphysical shift in movement.
- Will
