When considering elements used in a film, one must consider how to produce an auditory representation of a place to build something believable by using synthetic and natural sounds. It's all about capturing a viewer's attention and convincing them to believe in the film. If any part, such as the sound of the area, are incorrect, the audience will not be encapsulated by the film since they will not believe in it.
According to the Screen Sound Journal, ‘creating an environmental soundtrack for cinema is as much a technical craft as it is an aesthetic art form.’ It's not so much about making something realistic as it is about immersing the viewer in it through the use of emotive music, sound effects, foley, and wild tracks.
There is a lot that goes into creating a film's soundscape. Typically, there are five sections of sound score that contribute to the overall sound of a film:
- Dialogue
- Score
- SFX
- Foley
- Wildtrack
This list is written in order of most importance.
The Dialogue narration is either delivered on set or overdubbed in the studio for a more controlled tone.
The score is the music that plays in the background and it can range from orchestration to generic mood music to create a certain emotion and environment on screen.
SFX is an abbreviation for Sound Effects, which can range from booms and crashes in an action picture to bounces and bubbles in a cartoon, like shown as an example in our preious post about Finding Nemo and Finding Dory.
Foley is the process of making noises in a studio and matching the audio to the visuals. Horse hooves and gear, for example, are frequently overdubbed in a studio by using the bottoms of coconuts against whatever surface is on film and individuals physically moving about the horse's gear to recreate the horse's movements on screen.
A wild track serves as an underlying mood for a film. It produces a film's ambience and room environment while also ensuring that everything flows smoothly. It may be accomplished by the use of buzz sounds, drones, or even silence.
The three P's are also very crucial to consider while writing a cinematic score:
Placement + Proximity + Perspective
These three characteristics will entail how the audience sees the film. Where each sound is positioned in respect to the space, how far or near it is to the screen, and where the camera/audience is in relation to the sound are all important considerations.
A composer can manipulate the perception of a sound in several ways:
Compression: Compression is the process of increasing the loudness of the quieter sections of a sound while decreasing the level of the louder parts to make the audio sound fuller in a mix. This squashes a sound together and reduces its dynamic range.
EQ: An equaliser is a device used to modify the frequencies of an audio track. You may remove and add frequencies with an EQ plugin. You may reduce high and low-end frequencies from a recording to remove tinniness and muddiness, making it sound cleaner and more accurate.
Reverb: To create space, reverb is applied. When you apply reverb to an audio file, it adds distance depending on how much you use; the more reverb a piece of audio has, the further away it is perceived in the film.
Gain staging and volume: Gain staging and volume are used to order the distance of a sound in relation to the screen. For example, to bring a piece of audio to the forefront of the mix. This is usually the final stage in mixing a sound, and it depicts where the sound is in the mix. The louder the sound, the closer it seems, establishing cohesion between the audio and visual.
