The medium I chose to work with was film, and the element I
wanted to explore within it was sound. More specifically, how you can play with
emotions through your score choices, without changing any of the film itself. I
made three shorts with all the same edit of a girl doing different things
outdoors, but changed the audio for each. The first is silent, where the viewer
is forced to focus on the events that are happening without much meaning coming
through them. The second has a fairly sad score to it which makes the girls
actions seem lonely, since she is doing things all by herself. And the third
has both a mellow score and a voice over of the girl reading a Walt Whitman
quote, which drastically changes the short into something that is uplifting and
happy.
One of my
sources of inspiration was the abstract filmmaker Terrance Malick, who is one
of my favorite writer/directors. When I first saw Tree of Life, I was blown
away by how he used montages and the spectacle to mainly tell his story. I am
not nearly as artistic as he is, but that is what I was aiming for when I
initially shot my footage, which is why I chose shots of looking up into trees
(which he has done in multiple films), following my subject from behind, and
exclusively shooting outdoors, which he favors in his films as well. Before I
filmed though, I watched his latest film, To The Wonder, to get more ideas of
what I could play with within film. Malick chooses to open with shots of the
main characters doing things outdoors, with an underlying score, and the woman
doing a voice over about love. It was a beautiful scene that I decidedly had to
try my best to duplicate with my own twist, because it was amazing to me how
thought provoking something so simple could be, without anything big or climactic
really happening on screen.
What made
me want to do the different versions of the same thing though was the comic
strip we read by Scott McCloud, where he explains, “in comics at its best,
words and pictures are like partners in a dance and each one takes turns
leading.” When applied to film, it is the images that are shown and the sounds
that go with them that are dancing instead. He also exemplified this point by
telling a mini story with both the pictures and words, and then showed the
story again but with only the words and no images. This is why I chose one of
my shorts to be silent, so that can see how vastly different a series of images
can be by changing something as simple as the sound, but leaving everything
else the same.
After
working with sound within film, I am even more interested with it than I was
before. It is so interesting to me how different emotions can be evoked with
all the same images. I asked my subject to look content rather than happy or
sad so her facial expressions didn’t drive you to one emotion or another.
Without that, the silent version is extremely dull, the second version has room
to seem sad because of the slow and depressing tune, and the third can attach
to her thoughtfulness because of what is being said to the audience who is most
likely being thoughtful as well.
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