What’s the Score

What’s the Score, a panel talk hosted by David Barker and Pacho Velez, was held on November 13th at 5pm in Hunter College’s Third Work Symposium. In this discussion panel, Barker and Velez presented their view on sound design in the score. The presenters defined the three standard sound elements in film to be; foley, ambience, and the score. They then compared these elements to the ambience in short clips that they played for the audience. In every clip Barker and Velez would show examples of how ambience was heard, and in every clip they were stressing the importance of there being a new element in sound design. In their words this new sound design element was based on making the ambience and the sound in the picture very close to the viewer of the film. They stressed that this created a sense that everything outside of the frame becomes more present than is usually seen in contemporary day films. What I believe they were going for was to have the stereo levels and equalization of the ambient noises, which were not seen in the frame, to be very amplified, panned very close in front, and made very present. From what I understood, this was supposed to bring the onlookers of the film not only into the frame’s direct setting, while making them feel as though they were there, but was supposed to almost force the onlookers be present in the frame cognitively. An example of what I mean is that when I watch a movie, read a book, or listen to someone, I can be listening to them, and then I can realize that my thoughts have wandered off to some tangents. This wandering off can result in me not knowing the material of the last two pages of a book, and will force me to reread them. This is due to the fact that I was mechanically reading and looking at words written in the book, but my mind became tired and jumped to some other thoughts that were of bigger interest to me. From what I understood, Barker and Velez were trying to make the background noises more present, so as to engage and keep the attention of the onlookers in the frame to be more present. They were trying to get their message across to the public by showing many clips with the background ambient noise being almost too loud and present, but towards the end of their showing were met with a lot of skepticism and criticism, because the topic was a on a very confusing matter.

What's Wrong?

Here's a video that a group of student's from Hunter College, including me, participated in.
Enjoy! ;)

What's Wrong? from Michael Kuznetsov on Vimeo.

At the Museum of Moving Image (MOMI)

Today is November 25th, 2015. We have gathered at MOMI at 11a.m., and were toured through various exhibits and demonstrations relating to media production. Some demonstrations that had to do with audio editing were of particular interest to me, since I'm a musician interested in audio engineering. Primarily, the demonstration on automatic dialogue replacement (ADR), really struck me, because it turned out to be so much easier to replace synced dialogue in post production than I expected it to be. Our group of twenty Hunter college students entered a small 4 by 4 yard audio isolated soundproof room, in which there was a large tv screen, a microphone, and headphones. We picked a scene from the classic film "Some Like it Hot," and replaced a thirty second snippet of Marilyn Monroe's voice with our own voices by following a karaoke like procedure. Firstly we played back the 30 seconds of the movie with subtitles lighting up as the actors spoke. While observing the actor's lip movement and the lighting up of the subtitles on the screen, we listened to the recording of the actors' voices, while trying to internalize the rhythmic, melodic, and intonation structure that the actors originally had in the scene. When we got the sense of what the dialogue was supposed to sound like, we clicked the record button, and after being counted in, recorded our voices over the original recording. The results were really close to being in sync with the images on screen, and with a little bit of post editing, could be made seamless. The whole process of a 30 second ADR took us only a couple of minutes, which struck me as being so fast and so accurately in sync with the original image. ADR created a whole new level of audio quality in the world of moving images, by creating an option to fix sound design bloopers in post production.