George Lucas's Star Wars



George Lucas's Star Wars

Introduction

A movie can be beautifully shot, well written, and brilliantly acted, but in order to be truly great, it also needs exquisite sound. When you think about it, sound is what lets the audience experience film on a visceral level. It's one thing to watch an image of a police chase on a screen; it's quite another to watch that screen while sirens blare in your ears and footsteps pound the ground!

Sound Effects

All sound components have unique roles to play in the film experience. Speech cannot be more important than music, for example, as the absence or presence of music will affect a different aspect of the immersive experience. Yet, unlike music or speech, ambience is yet to be well established as a noteworthy component in the theoretical domain. Chion comments:For a long time natural sound or noises were the forgotten elements, the “repressed” part of film not just in practice but also in analysis. There are a thousand studies of music (by far the easiest subject, since culturally the best understood), and numerous essays on the text of dialogues, and finally some work on the voice…but noises, those humble foot soldiers, have remained the outcasts of theory, having been assigned a purely utilitarian and figurative value and consequently neglected. The comparative ratio of ambience utilized in film varies greatly according to genre and directors' methodology. However, the main problem applicable to all genres is overdependency on music as the emotive force. Incidental music (music that seemingly has no direct connection with the visuals) could be replaced with visually specific atmospheres creating a concrete bond in the immersive process. Immersion is the final product, like a baked cake. All other components, be it the narrative, acting, editing or sound design are the ingredients. To draw the metaphor further, some people are happy to choose the same type of cake repeatedly, resulting in a level of mediocrity that has amassed thousands of unexceptional films. The exceptional and original projects use intelligent methodology. Audiences may be sub-consciously wizened to the formulated method that attempts to trigger our emotions and may become bored with a film without knowing why. Re-administering the use of sound components may be highly effective; the potentials of which, audiences are unaware.

When music is used in an attempt to cover clumsy picture editing, to compensate poor acting or simply placed inappropriately in a particular scene, it clearly becomes a hindrance rather than an aid. Naturally, if music is unnecessarily utilized it is occupying aural space which ambience could have used.

All sounds share fundamental components: rhythm, velocity, volume, pitch, timbre and frequency. It is feasible therefore to draw a correlation between emotive devices of music composition with the arrangement of sounds other than music in a diegetic environment. Most ambiences are rendered, therefore the instrumentation and quality of an ambience texture like music could be sharp, attacking, noisy, sparse, dense, and subtle. Ambience presents a rich opportunity for conveying emotional stimulus, without presenting the ...