research and classwork 

Research

Film scene review 1

Sound

This is a scene from Alice in Borderland season 1. During this scene you can hear the background music in the beginning start off as unsettling, showing us that the characters don't fully understand what is happening and do not feel safe either. Starting off with unsettling background music can create the same effect for the audience as neither do they fully understand what is happening to the characters either. This background music with the robotic voice of the game helps enhance that unnerving atmosphere. The robotic voice does not show any emotion, there creating a monotone voice which creates the unsettling feeling. The background music does carry emotion however, it is not a joyful emotion which helps calm the audience but rather an eerie and dramatic emotion. During the scene where the gas starts to fill the room, you can hear the background music slowly become louder as the characters become more and more alarmed. This helps build up the tension in the scene. You can hear the music stop once the tension reaches it's climax where the girl dies suddenly. This helps create heighten the shock the other characters and the audience would feel seeing the girl die.  

Acting 

The characters have to be confused at the start of the scene as they do not know what is going on, this is shown through the acting of the actors, looking around and each other as more information about the game is revealed to them. They are all hesitant to do anything which shows that they have their guard up in this unfamiliar environment. Near the end of the scene when the characters get more and more distressed, you can see the actress who plays the young school girl look at the 'alive' door before running to open it. This shows that she felt panic and stress before giving in and risking her life for the others. Before, the other characters were urging each other to open a door in order to save their own life. You can see that the three male characters do not trust the older female character when they question her choice and look at her a bit confused and unconvinced of her reasoning. The other actors keep looking at each other while being nervous and alarmed while trying their best not to breath in the smoke.    

Editing

In this scene, at the start, the camera shots tend to be medium shots or close up. This was most likely done so the viewer could see the expressions that the characters were making. This allows the viewer to understand the emotions that the characters are experiencing which would in turn make the audience understand that the characters are most likely in danger which would create the atmosphere of tension. As the characters are shown the first room where they have to choose between the two doors, the camera shows the room as the characters see it by placing itself in the spot where the elevator was and showing the room as a whole slowly which would be like the characters, who are seeing this room for the first time, taking the room in at their pace. This was done as the audience know as much as the characters know which allows them to be on the same level of information and as the characters get fed more information do so the audience. 

Importance of Sound

Diegetic and Non-diegetic sound

• Diegetic sound- These are sounds that can only be heard within the universe of the film. Another way this can be described is that these sounds are the sounds the character can hear. Such as, a car's engine, wind or speech. 
• Non-diegetic sound- These are sounds that exist outside of the film's universe. Such as background music or added sound effects. Therefore these are sounds that only the audience can hear and the characters cannot. 

Challenges of location recording

Sometimes there will be wind which can ruin the sound recording completely and  be difficult to remove. Other times the space in which you record in can have a lot of empty space, meaning that your recording will have a lot of reverb. This is not ideal as the recording would not be as clear as it could be, resulting in a lower quality recording. Something else is that there may be background noise where you film which could affect the quality of your recording. This shows that choosing the location of your recoding can have many different effects on your recoding so you have to take these factors into account when choosing a location.  

Foley sound design

Foley sounds are sounds that are added in after filming and are created by using everyday object to mimic sounds that can not be recorded for either health and safety reasons or other reasons for why the sound could not have been recorded with the scene.  

Background/ Ambient

These sounds belong to whatever is happening in the background of the scene, such as cars moving past or people talking in the distance. These sounds are necessary in the scene as it allows the scene to come alive and engage the audience much more effectively. 

Film scene recreation 2

During this scene, there are a lot of sounds that both the audience and the characters can hear, making those sounds diegetic. Examples are the sounds of the Ikran screeching, footsteps and speech. There are also sounds of movement which add more to the realism effect the movie as a whole went after. These sounds all exist within the world of the scene which means that the character hears these sounds as well as the audience. However, if you listen for it, you can hear background music which varies in intensity as the scene plays out, this is to enhance the tension created in the scene by the posing danger of the animal before it is deemed as safe. This is a sound that can not be heard by the characters. This is because as the scene is happening, there is no such thing as background music which makes the sounds non-diegetic as it does not exist in the movie's world and only the audience can hear it. Sounds such as the screeching from the Ikran are foley sounds as this animal is completely fictional and can not be recorded in real time. In this case, most of the sounds heard in the movie are foley as the entire scene is CGI. This applies to the footsteps, the waterfall and the ambience sounds as well. 

This scene has emotions and actions such as worry, confusion and mockery. In order to show this the actors had used their body language. The protagonist, Jake Sully, is show to be slightly hesitant and on guard  before fighting the Ikran. This is shown by the actor taking small steps to get closer to the animal which shows the character as hesitant to face this life or death battle. However, though he seemed hesitant, we can see that he is determined and the hesitation disappears and he takes a quick step towards on of the Ikrans to start a fight. When the character has met its 'chosen' Ikran, you can see that the character realises that as he tilts his head and then hisses to fight back. The two then continue on to have a struggle where Jake wins in the end. While filming, there was no real Ikran and the actor had to imagine there being an Ikran. This would have really put his acting skills to the test as he had to imagine the whole environment around him. The same applied to all of the other actors and actresses. 

Jake Sully is the protagonist as well as the narrator for the movie. While the director could have had another character narrate or have an anonymous narrator, they chose to have the protagonist as the narrator. Having him as the narrator means that the audience would have a better understanding of his emotions as the protagonist and would also have a better understand of what is happening in the movie. One of the ways this is done is that as the movie plays out from beginning to end, the audience and the protagonist learn about this new world together as in the beginning, the protagonist knew little about this world just like the audience which supports the idea that he is best fit as narrator.    

In comparison of the two film scenes I have written about, they are two very different scenes with completely different actions going on in them. However, the two still have some sort of tension growing in them, a built up to a point of climax in the scene. In the scene from Alice in wonderland, we can hear the music change as the tension grows between the characters, this is similar to what happens in the Avatar scene since there is also background music which helps add to the tension. With this we can see how even though they are two different scenes with different characters, different locations and different storylines, we can see that they still share similarities with music that helps build up tension to make the scene much more thrilling to watch. This also helps us understand the importance of music in film scenes as we got two examples of how music can make an impact on scenes to add emotion and tension. 

However, in terms of visuals, the two scenes can not be anymore different. The scene from avatar is all animated and CGI while the scene from Alice in borderland is mostly live action. The colours in the avatar scene are also much more vibrant compared to the other scene. This makes sense since one scene takes place inside a building with artificial lighting while the other takes place outside and while it is shown to be cloudy, there is still much more light there compared to the Alice in borderland. There are also different characters, one scene having blue aliens and alien creatures while the other has normal humans, this is probably what differentiates the two scenes the most. Visually, the Avatar scene has a lot more to see, with the background and the main action itself since the colours draw us in more. 

This was a task given to us where we had to film a scene using a boom stick. We had 2 actors, one camera operator, one person in charge of the boom stick and another with the recorder and headphones. In this video you can see the boom stick in the frame at the bottom, usually the boom stick is not included in the frame and is considered as a mistake if it is in frame. We had positioned the microphone below the two subjects who were creating the sound. This way we were able to not have the boom in the frame completely however, the microphone had hit the floor 2 times which created some unnecessary noise. In the start and end of the recording, we had some static noise which had to be cut out. This could have been because the wires of the microphone were not plugged in completely or because of another reason that we were not aware of while filming.  

Visual conventions 

In this screen grab, you can see a sunset which has an ombre of orange to yellow. This lets the audience know what time of day it is while also setting the atmosphere as sunsets or sunrises have the connotations of calm, perfection and quietness. Sunsets are also visually pleasing which enhances the effect of it symbolising perfection and calmness. This allows the character's conversation to seem normal and friendly, this makes it seem as if the characters in the scene are friends. This is supported by the fact that the characters are sitting quite close together which shows that they are comfortable enough to be that close to each other. The character on the left is shown to be smoking from its shadow, from this we can tell that he is calm as people often smoke to become calm and destress which is something that character could be doing while talking with the other character in a relaxed manner. The characters are also placed in the middle of the scene which makes them the first thing we see when we look at the scene. This means that one of the first thoughts we get when looking at this scene would be that the two characters are friends. Even though we can not see their facial expressions we can still tell what the atmosphere is in the scene through their body language and background colours. We are still able to get a lot of information through shadows. 

FOLEY TRY-OUT

Above is a link to a video in where Foley sounds have been added to make the scene seem more life like. Foley sounds are sounds which are added after filming that are created using everyday objects to sound like what is happening in the scene that can not be recorded without hurting anyone or just simply can not be recorded in real time. Examples of Foley sounds may be using a carrot to mimic a bone breaking or crushing the inside of a watermelon to mimic guts being crushed. In the screenshot, you can see that I used adobe audition to put all the 'fake' sounds together so they play at the correct time. 

Picture of me holding a watermelon which I soon ruined so I could make the sound of guts being squashed. 

AMBIENT SOUND

Ambient sound is also known as background noise which is essential in most film scenes as background noise is not what the audience typically focus on but it helps make the scene feel much more life like and therefore the audience would feel as if they are actually present in the scene.  Without any background sounds the scene would feel incomplete and not have the same effect. 

Down below are ambient sounds that I had recorded with two other classmates. We took the ZoomH4n and went around the college and record background noises that we could hear. The first one is when we went outside the college and recorded the sound of traffic which is near by, the second one is the sounds you could her standing outside the toilets and the third one is the sounds you could hear while going up the stairs. 

Here is another version of the foley audio where there are some effects added to the audio. You can hear at the start, the voice that says "finish him" is much deeper than it was to start with. This was done by editing the pitch of the audio while stretching it. 

You right click on the audio you wish to edit and scroll down to 'stretch' then go to 'stretch properties'. On the left of your screen, you will see some properties come up and here you can stretch the audio to it plays for longer without changing the pitch that much.  

However, if you wanted to change the pitch  then you can move the circle along the line up or down depending on whether you want the pitch  to be higher or lower. I wanted the pitch to be lower so therefore I moves the circle backwards in order to achieve that. 

This is the final version with all the sound added and down below is the Audio planner for this video. 

Phone Fx task

In this lesson I had learn't how to edit an audio on adobe audition to give it the effect as if it is coming through a phone. Audio when played on a phone tends to come out as muffled and not in the best quality. You can listen to the full edited audio down below by downloading it.  

In order to achieve the effect I first added the unedited audio into audition with the ringing audio and the two voices having their own track, The I turned on the FX button at the top so I could see the little numbered lanes under each track. 

I then selected the track I wanted the effect to be on and went down to Filter and EQ then to FFT Filter. 

Then this small window popped up and here I can edit the audio. 

I had double clicked on the blue line to create the small white boxes and then I could drag them down and up so I could make the audio sound muffled. 

Garage band work

These were created on garage band and though it helps me explain why I did not pick Music for GCSE, it was still fun to do and I did pick up new skills for garage band since I never had used it before. 

Me and a group of others had tried out ADR. You can see the results down below.