Exercise 1: Evoking Emotion Through Sound in Film

Sound is an integral part of any film. Some even say that the quality of a moving picture is 50% sound. Iconic sound design as seen in Jurassic Park or Star Wars have created their own worlds and defined a genre. Sound creates reality, makes things believable but also influence the emotion of a scene enormously. That's what we want to focus on in this exercise.

What to do

• Pick a short (60+s) sequence of a movie of your choice (preferably without dialogue).
• Think of two different ways you can change or set the mood of the scene through sound. This can be any of the following or something else:
  • happy / uplifting
  • romantic
  • danger / suspense
  • sad / dark
  • funny / comedic
  • …
• Take your scene into any DAW (digital audio workstation) or NLE (nonlinear editing software) and create two different soundtracks from scratch. Don’t use any of the original sounds.

Presentation

• Show the two versions of your sequence
• Short explanation (with or without slides) of
• why you chose that specific scene?
• what was your intention / what mood were you going for
• what was your approach to achieving that?
• what sounds do you think helped you to inflict the desired emotions?
• what did you struggle with and what could you have done better?
• second screening of your sequence

You can use any sound you can find on the internet. If you find sounds that are not in the public domain or free of licence you can use them for the screening in class but have to be really careful when putting it on the web. Self recorded sounds are much appreciated.