Sound for Screen Week 6 – Up 2

I talked to Jessica this week about the clip I chose and told her some of my ideas. But she told me I couldn’t keep the original track of the clip. I told her I wasn’t very good at making music and she suggested I try to make a version without music. 

There are two clips of Carl and Ellie lying on the grass looking at the clouds, and when the music was removed from this part, there was no sound other than the ambient sound. I had wondered if Ellie laying on the picnic cloth and waving her hand would create some kind of scraping sound, and I actually tried that during the Foley stage last week, but I found that the sound was very small and even inaudible. If the sound is placed in a very quiet indoor environment or the camera is given a close-up, the sound can be heard. Or if the scene is made from a subjective point of view, such a small sound can be heard. But if it’s in an outdoor scene and given a medium shot, the sound is so low that it can be ignored. So I had to focus on the environment, think about it, in the scene, only Ellie and Carl two people, but it is possible there was a child playing on the other side of the hill and it could be the reason why Carl imagined the clouds as a baby. Suddenly, my mind was opened and there were some interior scenes where I could have added the sound of the wall clock. There is a gramophone playing songs next to them as they read a book in the house. I noticed that in the scene where Carl and Ellie are pushing the sofa there is a gramophone on the left, and although it doesn’t appear in the images of the house afterwards, it should still be present in Carl and Ellie’s house. So I used the gramophone as a source of sound and added diegetic music to the scene of Carl and Ellie’s home.

After a series of close-ups of Carl and Ellie wearing ties, Carl and Ellie enter old age hand in hand. The sound of tying a tie would not have conveyed the feeling of time flying by, so I ended up using music, a song. This is the song that Carl and Ellie used to play on the gramophone in their home when they were younger, and Carl and Ellie still play it in their home when they were old. The song starts off with the texture of a gramophone playing out and with a series of montages the texture of the song changes. When Carl and Ellie with white hair appears in the screen, the song goes back to the gramophone.

A final thank you to Jiachen to create the very nice music for this clip. As well as a thank you to my boyfriend for helping me with the Foley part at home.