Contact Intro - Earth Universe Space Zoom Out
Revolving around alien contact and life out of the known universe, Contact creates a captivating and impressive opening sequence. Following the typical zoom out effect, it starts with our home planet earth and continues to zoom until we reach outer depths of our galaxy and then further into deep space. Though we are not watching the video for the visuals but specifically the audio. To begin with camera panning past Earth we are welcomed with the familiar noise of radio waves and recent music that was around the release time of the film. As we continue and begin to leave our solar system we are greeted by more radio waves however following science, we hear radio waves that have travelled from far the earth many years ago. From present to the iconic sounds of our history, we eventually reach so far that we hear the very first radio waves. I love the fact that they have the paid this amount of attention to detail when representing a journey through space, demonstration just how small we really are in this void.
Lewton Bus - Cat People
A very famous sound sequence that is still used very frequently today, it has basically become a gag with in movies. As our actress walks her footsteps begin to echo, so much to the point that they do not match with her own. After becoming more agitated and speeding up they become louder and more frequent. When she stops, the noise stops, when she continues, the noise continues, indicating someone or something really is following her. When she finally stops to check we hear a short noise that resembles a growl, we instantly think the 'cat people' are going to appear only to be greeted by a breaking bus that merges with the sound. Now days sound design has progressed to that an almost real sound that you can't distinguish if you're hearing for real or not, this effect has much more impact now than it did then but people were not desensitized to it when it first arrived.
Star Wars Episode II: Sound Design
This documentary was basically the inner workings of sound fx for the Star Wars as a whole (as they continue in the same universe and time so naturally there are reoccurring sounds). A good portion of the sounds have to be re-captured in post, trying to record of these sounds at once in a take makes it almost impossible. Take wind machine for example, this is going to completely ruin the voice of the actors but they need these sounds for atmosphere, so this is where ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement) comes in to make be able to mix all these sounds as needed (Around 6:00 in the documentary. There is also Foley, this basically means taking real sounds to supplement and compliment synthetic noises to create a finished realistic vision. They would record regularly English spoken words and cut them, to them slow them down and after speed them. This would create a strange collection of sounds that had an irregular clicking noise to them; this was then the chosen sound for the insect people in the movie.
Lastly there is 'Final Mix', the director will meet wit the head sound directors and watch the entire film (in sections) and analyse every piece of audio. Break it down and make sure everything sounds authentic and realistic. This of course is a very time consuming process, to the point where only minutes of film are checked because there is so many layers and elements in each shot. For legal reasons and that the sounds are re-used through out the Star Wars series, most of the sounds are not usable in other projects unless they changed to the point they are not easily recognisable. Iconic sounds like the Imperial droids and R2-D2 are part of this whole concept.
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