Week 7

I haven’t heard much from my Director or AD since the crew meetings a few weeks ago, but we start filming next week so I am assuming they will be reaching out more towards the end of the week to give us a shooting schedule and prepping us for the week shoot. In the meantime I went back and watched Inception, trying to focus on the sound design as it was done by Ed Novick, who was also the sound mixer for Mullholland Drive, which is where the director I am working with is getting a lot of inspiration.

Here are some of my notes from that film about the sound design:

they really focusing on enhancing the environmental sounds
layering the sound, sort of goes along with how the dreamscapes are kind of layered
lots of silences in important moments
that horn sound that plays throughout the film, apparently called the “BRAAM” effect, as it is made by lowering the frequencies of brass instruments

I then compared those with my sound notes about Mulholland Drive, and found similarities within the way that the sound design uses silence to juxtapose the stress of the atmosphere and make the audience more uncomfortable, lots of ambient sounds and layering of many different kinds of diegetic noise to create a very complex sound scape, as well as the use of repeating sound motifs.

I know that this research might be slightly unnecessary for me, as I have no control or say in the final soundscape, or even the type of sound recorded on set, but it still is really interesting and cool to learn about. I also feel like it will really help me when I am on set to be less clueless about what is going on, and maybe I will be able to suggest certain things if I have ideas about sounds to the Sound Recorder, which I don’t think I would have been comfortable doing if I was more clueless about the sound design aspect.

On Friday I finally got sent the shooting schedule, as well as my first call sheet for Monday, and I feel like over the past few weeks especially I have done everything I can to prepare myself for set on Monday!