98 Moving Images: Making Movies, Understanding MediaSing-Along Blog (2008), created for Internet distribution and later adapted
with sing-along commentary for its DVD release by director Joss Whedon
and his collaborative team.Designing Sound
With music added to the picture, we can see the many elements that
combine to form the composite sound track to a standard motion picture.
As mentioned earlier, the application of inventive ideas for the creation of
the composite sound track was evident in the fi rst years of sound, as was
discussed regarding Clair, Eisenstein, and Pudovkin, and was later apparent in
the work of the Disney studios and such fi lmmakers as Orson Welles, Jacques
Tati, and Stanley Kubrick, among many others. As sound recording, mixing,
and reproduction increased in complexity and range of methods and tools,
the role of an architect to establish a blueprint for the structure of sound in
the fi lm and to oversee its creation was seen as necessary in many fi lms. In
contemporary cinema, sound design has become a key creative underpinning
to the work of the sound recording and mixing teams.
In contemporary moviemaking, sound design is viewed as a cornerstone
of the marriage of image and sound. Th is evolution in the role of recordists
and mixers and the subsequent creation of the role of the sound designer
stems in particular from the groundbreaking work of Walter Murch in the late
1960s and 1970s, most notably through his fi lms with Francis Ford Coppola,
including Th e Conversation, Th e Godfather, and Apocalypse Now. Sound
designers oversee and guide the many choices of all the contributors who
create the tracks of sound eff ects that are mixed together for the compositeFigure 3-17 Sound pioneer
George Groves at an early
mixing board. (Courtesy of
http://www.georgegroves.org.uk)Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).