Sound and Editing
This week we were learning about sound, and how it can be used to set the tone and atmosphere of a scene, as well as how editing can be used to play with the audiences’ sense of time and affect how they view the scene.
There are two types of sound in film, diegetic sound is sound with a source in the world of the fil itself. Diegetic sound is something that the characters in the movie can hear, sounds like dialogue or an explosion. They help establish the setting as well as help the world feel more real. Then there’s non-diegetic sound which is sound added during editing, such as music, which can’t be heard in the world of the film. We also learned about the difference between sound Design and Mixing. Sound Design is when you create the sound, such as through Foley, and Mixing is taking the sounds and cutting them so they match with the footage.
For editing we learned about two styles of editing, the Hollywood continuity style of editing and Soviet Montage, two styles which couldn’t be more different. Hollywood Continuity editing is meant to make the cuts and transitions seamless so that the audience doesn’t notice them and they can focus on the movie. There are a lot of technique for this, eyeline matches will cut following where a character is looking and other cuts, like cross and match cuts, will have the action in one shot be close to the action of the next shot so that the audience has a smoother time watching the film. In the clip we were shown in class, during a montage scene the action from each shot lead smoothly into the next, so even though there’s a lot of cuts it’s not distracting or erratic.
In this clip we saw the action around 1:40 even though there are lots of quick cuts very frequently, the way eyeline matches are used makes it flow easily.
On the other hand Soviet Montage is meant to cut images together to put a message into the viewers head. I earned about this in A level, the best example is the movie Battleship Potemkin. One of the shots near the end cuts frequently between a general tapping a cane and shots of a church, meant to symbolize how the Soviet’s saw the military as an oppressive arm of the Catholic church. Or when the battleship fires it’s cannon, cut with a lion statue standing tall, symbolizing the brave rise of the people. Soviet Montage uses lots of obvious cuts as a way of portraying a message.