Sound for Screen Week 4 – The crossing

I needed to choose a clip from a film to prepare for the next stage of the exercise. I chose the film The Crossing, directed by Xue Bai, which was released in 2018.

The film follows the unique experience of Pei Pei. Studying in Hong Kong but living in Shenzhen (the port city of Mainland China), Peipei has spent 16 years in her life traveling between these two cities. To realize the dream of seeing snow in Japan with her bestie, Peipei joins a smuggling gang and uses her student identity to smuggle iPhones from Hong Kong to Mainland. Her family life and friendships begin to fall apart. The daily life of Peipei starts to get out of control.

I mentioned this film last semester and I really liked the sound design of the film. I was read an interview with the sound creator of this film, who shared some of his thoughts on designing sound. He mentioned two points that I found very interesting. The first point was the different ambient feel of the two cities. The ambient sound in Hong Kong feels very humid and all the sounds are very close together. Whereas Shenzhen sounds very empty and desolate, with all the sounds very far away. The sound designer said he approached the ambience of the two cities in this way because of the protagonist. It’s the protagonist’s sense of the two cities. Hong Kong is a flowery world for the protagonist, it has everything that interests. Shenzhen, on the other hand, is the protagonist’s home, but there is only alienation and loneliness here. The second point is a scene in the middle, where the protagonist and a young man have to wrap their mobile phones with tape around their bodies. The creative team chose to use the method of erotic films to create this piece. The sound designer chose to use the method of ASMR(autonomous sensory meridian response) to create the sound for this scene. This is the clip I chose.