Whitstable filmmaker Zara Waldebeck talks about sound design
As a writer and director, I have always been interested in the possibilities of sound. It seems to me that in a medium like film and video, sound and music works as the `unconscious´ of the picture - it mainlines straight into the emotions. For the low budget filmmaker it is a particularly loyal friend. If you pay enough attention to it, it can allow you to do things which would be prohibitively expensive to shoot and make even the simplest images feel rich and resonant.
What I also love about sound is that after the long and arduous process of shooting and editing, when you are getting thoroughly sick of your masterpiece and beginning to wonder why you ever began this foolish idea, it is often at the stage of music and sound-post that it begins to come alive and feel full of possibilities again. As with all things, there is of course a downside to this - it is far too easy to just slap a bit of atmospheric music on an ailing picture and hope it will do the trick. So beware its seductive power.
Throughout my short films, I have worked with more or less the same team of sound designers and composers (Bob Stornoway and Bryan Badger Pilgrim, with the addition of Fabrice Pougnard for Ssssh!). In my last project, Pros & Cons of Camouflage, all original music was written specifically for the film (cheaper and far more satisfying) with one of the actors singing (who was accidentally discovered to own a fine baritone).
We also continued with a technique Bob Stornoway had been exploring, of making music out of indigenous location sounds and playing with them to create the base for the score. This helps create the right atmosphere in a subconscious manner which is then complimented with sympathetic instruments (the film was set in a natural organic environment and so we used wood blocks, finger pianos and one-string calibasses).
In my new film Ssssh!, about a man driven to the edge of madness by being unable to sleep due to noises and sounds around him, the story itself has become about the nature of sound and hearing. It is currently in post-production and the sound is - as predicted - taking a long time as it is a complicated and very delicate process. But one that is crucial if the story is to work!S The film was shot in a studio in West London on a specially built set. Luckily my sound recordist is one of the sound design team and so we compiled a list of all possible sounds we might want later on. Often sound needs are shunted to the back of the queue on location, but we spent a few hours at the end of a day with actor John Donnelly (currently in Red Caps on BBC 1), asking him to do things like fall over, shuffle, run, breathe, mumble, smash clocks, turn off taps. Luckily he is a great and generous professional and threw himself into the task with gusto (and ending up with more than a few carpet burns for his trouble).
The post production process has been very interesting. I was very lucky in finding an editor with an interest in and understanding of sound, Keith Wright (trained at the NFTS and now a director in his own right). As an aside, I cannot emphasise enough how important I think spending time on finding the right crew is, of being patient and holding your nerve until you find the right person. I have bitterly regretted it in the past when I have dived in and gone with someone just because I was in a rush or hoped it would somehow work out. If casting is 90% of a good performance, then crewing up well is certainly at least 60% of a good film. So take time to do it right, be patient and above all, trust your gut instinct.
Anyway, back to the editing. Keith had an excellent idea that we should first edit the film mute. There is only one line of dialogue in the whole film (more a scream of despair than anything else) but a whole host of sound effects that are crucial to the narrative. By concentrating on the picture first, we weren´t relegating the sound to second division, but rather making sure that the picture could stand on its own two feet and not have to be shored up by the sound. It was basically a tough litmus test to see if the story actually worked. We spent about two to three days editing mute and then began to create a guidetrack of sound which we then began to amend the picture to. The main problem with a process like this is that ideally you would like to keep switching between sound design and picture editing - do a cut, work on the sound, go back and re-edit, go back and tweak the sound.
The normal way of creating a locked off picture that is then given to sound designers and composers is really too rigid for this film's needs, but due to a pretty small budget, this ideal was but a dream. So we hence felt the need to at least create a sense of what the sounds might be in the film during the off-line edit to see if it would work and how we would have to alter the picture to suit it. Though the sound is now being changed in quite major ways by the sound designers, many ideas created in the last stages of the edit are still in there. I also discovered during this time that sound was the perfect place to try and add a pinch of comedy - sound is just fantastic for this and I wish I had considered the potential of this more when writing the script.
Because Ssssh! as a film is concerned with the sounds the character hears/experiences, there is no real music as such. This was another interesting anomaly - usually if you need to underscore a point or emphasise an emotion, the score is there to help you out. Here, all of this is being done with sounds rather than music. In the last few moments however, there is something I like to think of as music, though in its loosest sense. As the character finally finds a way to live with the noise around him and is able to fall sleep, we are shown how he begins to hear the same sounds from before in a new and not so disturbing way. This has proved extremely difficult and we are still working on it - it is such a delicate thing as we are now dealing not so much with the content of the sound (as they have to be the same or almost identical) but with the feel of them.
This again is an area I wish I had more money to spend on so I could do test screenings to see how different kinds of sound affect an audience. However, no point yearning, so we plough on. Right at the end of the film, these 'new' sounds begin to intertwine and become a sort of lullaby. Again I use the term loosely as it should have the feel of a lullaby without actually really being a song, more a harmony of the sounds previously heard in the film. This is providing the biggest stumbling block yet. Luckily, as described above, I had worked with Bob Stornoway and Bryan Badger Pilgrim with this method of making music out of sync sounds before and the script had partly been inspired by this. We are trying very hard to stick to a strict approach, where no outside sounds are allowed but where the 'music' is created out of the indigenous sound only. This is much more hardlined than in Camouflage or my first film Small Change, where it simply served as the base, but it seemed crucial to the meaning and feeling of the film so we are experimenting with pitch bending sounds and creating a rhythm with the feel of a melody.
It remains to be seen if it will be successful - not until the first screenings will we be able to tell. Until then, we will keep listening and tweaking and humming and hopefully at some point it will all come together in perfect harmony, just like in the film.
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