Film Sound Design Post Production Overview

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Tastes differ. But it is no doubt that these days it is difficult to find a person who doesn’t like films. A good film is always a result of the hard work of many people.

It is no doubt that these days the good sound is half of any picture. Watching a good film it is easy to forget that all the sounds are made artificially. This is used in order to make a film more realistic.

Sound design is almost as old as taking films itself. It is obvious that a better degree of the use of film sound improved the storytelling in modern cinema.

Due to the technological and cultural developments of sound design the expectations of filmgoers have changed. After the invention of Dolby Stereo sound systems obtained high-fidelity reproduction qualities. Before that film sound was of extremely low fidelity, and only occasional sound effects were in practice. With new powerful tools to produce sound more creative decisions are required now.

The responsible for the film’s audio track is a sound designer. He works with the director of the film to produce the soundtrack which would utilize all the expressive possibilities of new technical equipment. In Hollywood, the name of supervising sound editor stands for the head of the sound department (Lastra, 126).

Usually, there are two components in the soundtrack – dialogue and music. In modern cinema sound effects are widely used too. What is special about them is that they operate at sensual and emotional levels more than at an intellectual one. On the other hand, the word dialogue usually indicates a portion of the soundtrack that appeals more directly to the intellect. It is obvious that the dialogue is the most crucial source of story-telling for the audience. Sound effects are widely used to provide mood, ambiance, and size, but they do not carry information. They appeal to senses and emotions more than to the intellect. The dialogue is the main tool in the development of the plot.

Music appears to be something intermediate between dialogue and sound effects, but still, it mostly operates on an emotional/sensual plane. The music tells the viewers how to feel in every moment of the narration. In most cases, the audience is unaware of the fact that the music modulates its specific emotional response to what is being watched.

Sound effects are not stated to be more meaningful than other characteristics at many levels. But they also add up to the audience’s understanding of the plot and characters.

In sound, design music serves for both verbal and non-verbal communication whereas dialogue employs verbal communication only. Sound effects are a non-verbal means of communication. In the “final mix” dialogue, music, and sound effects are brought together to create a complex effect.

Storytelling in film deals with creating and breaking the continuity of fragments, because films are based on series of fragments of reality. Dialogue, music, and sound effects help to separate these fragments from each other (Hillman, 323).

Amelie is a French romantic comedy about love and shyness. It is a story of a young waitress who was brought up in rather strange circumstances. Her parents loved her immensely, but her world was devoid of any physical contact. After her mother’s death, Amelie lives only with her withdrawn father. Then the narration shifts to the story of the grown-up Amelie. She is quiet and shy; she thinks that the café she works in is full of romantic intrigue. After work, she retreats to her solitary apartment.

She begins to come out of her withdrawn world after she accidentally finds a childhood cache of mementos. Amelie decides to present the “treasure” to its owner. This leads to a series of successful attempts to intervene in the lives of others. The last person for Amelie to think about is herself. But she succeeds to bring harmony to the personal lives of her colleagues. She plays cruel tricks on her mischievous local grocer. The wonderful benefits of her try to help other people come at the end of the film. She encounters a young man who shows her the world of love for the first time (Hayes, 1).

In the sequence “seizing an Opportunity” which is under analysis the communication with the audience is purely non-verbal. Amelie comes home in a blue mood. To comfort herself she starts cooking. The Waltz of Amelie Poulain is the soundtrack for the film. It is repeated all over the film when there is a need to show Amelie’s involvement in her own world. The music is comforting and romantic. In this scene, Amelie is dreaming about the stranger collecting discarded photos whom she liked. The ambient sound, the Waltz, starts at a slow tempo. In her dream Amelie sees the young man buying some fruit for her. She’s so involved in her dream, that she even hears the rain falling. The sound makes the whole image more natural, almost “alive”. As the young man enters the house the tempo of the music increases. The man of her dream approaches Amelie; the music gradually becomes livelier. He enters the apartment. The dream is so close to reality that we hear floor planks creaking under the man’s feet. The climax of the sequence comes when the man’s standing behind Amelie, but she doesn’t even dare to look back. The man touches the curtain in the kitchen… and the dread and the reality overlap because Amelie really hears the curtain rustling. Amelie is stunned. The image of the man disappears as she looks back. But to her disillusionment, she discovers that the sound was produced by a cat entering the kitchen. The cat is purring quietly. The purring and rustling are of the curtain sound hyper-real. The viewer understands that Amelie is desperately lonely. The ambient sound continues as Amelie cries. But in an instance, it is sharply interrupted by an acousmatic sound, the ringing of the doorbell. We don’t see the cause of the sound; neither we know who rings the bell. But the idea is that somebody came to break Amelie’s solitude. At the end of the sequence, there is silence. It is also meaningful because Amelie is back to reality, but she doesn’t know what’s waiting for her.

Amelie’s Waltz is provided in three versions. The first one sounds in a typical Tiersen arrangement. Accordion sound adds a distinctly French atmosphere to the film. Waltz also creates a kind of merry-go-round impression, they in some way symbolize the whirlwind of life which the characters experience.

The film became extremely popular at once.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s eagerly awaited follow-up to Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulain attracted a startling 1.6 million spectators in its first week of release at the end of October 2004; the same week, seven out of the top ten films at the domestic box office were French productions (Hayes,1).

Amelie is a heartwarming film; it has wonderful imagery and a mysterious riddle to solve. The events of the film are presented in a magical way; the audience is constantly bombarded with trivial but sweet information when any new character is invented in the story. To crown it all, wonderful sound design makes this film a fascinating event for cinema-goers.

Works Cited

Hayes, Graeme, and Martin O’Shaughnessy. “French Cinema: Globalization, Representation, and Resistance.” French Politics, Culture and Society 23.3 (2005): 1.

Hillman, Roger. “Cultural Memory on Film Soundtracks.” Journal of European Studies 33.3-4 (2003): 323.

Lastra, James. Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity. Ed. John Belton. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

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Film Sound Design Post Production Overview

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