Morning has broken, and two businessmen have been working a late shift at their office. Having worked through the night, they are heading home, making way for the 8am reinforcements.
We follow the two characters through a mostly empty parking garage until the shake hands and part ways. We continue to follow one of the male characters, his brogued footsteps echoing throughout. A second set of footsteps becomes evident, slightly unsynced despite their attempts to be. The businessman becomes suspicious and stops a few times and looks around, listening for signs of unwelcome company. The first few times, the second set of footsteps come to halt at the same time as his own, and he writes it off as fatigue playing with him. The third time, he stops and the unwelcome footsteps continue and he feels wholly threatened.
This 'following' is but a diversion though. And as the attention is drawn towards investigating the threatening footsteps, our victims back is turned. From behind him, we see a barefooted man in a mask creep out from behind a car, unnoticed due to his lack of footwear. He attacks the businessman from behind, cueing the second attacker to reveal himself and join in the attack.
What culminates is a two and a half minute attack/fight sequence to the tune of Grieg's 'In The Hall Of The Mountain King'. Foley sound effects are used to emphasise the brutality of each hit (hitting leather jackets with a baseball bat, beating pieces of meat etc), with the most crucial blows synced with the dramatic hits of the music at it climaxes. Visually, the edits during the fight would be quick, sharp and taking into account all of the 360 degrees surrounding the altercation (see below-ish).
Pre Production
Above is the original idea that I pitched to Carl in January once we agreed to work together as we did (in a larger group) last term. He agreed that the idea of 'following' opened up a variety of opportunities to experiment with the creation of sound in different size spaces, and indeed, to use this project as an opportunity to experiment with the entire narrative filmmaking process for a second time. We proceeded to develop this idea and shoot the film ourselves, rather than opting to design sound for a 'found' footage sequence.
As we soon found out, filming a 360 degree, rapid edit fight sequence was slightly out of our depth, but we still wanted to explore the prospect of creating a sense of threat through the use of sound. Knowing full well that our project was to be assessed purely on its audio, we still wanted to make sure that we provided a solid audiovisual relationship in our work.
As a referential starting point, we began to look closer at the work of many of our favourite directors and films that have been widely praised for their sound design. For the type of film we were going to try an make, the films of Nicolas Winding Refn and David Fincher.
Fincher has employed the same supervising sound editor in all of his films; Ren Klyce. Fincher's meticulousness coupled with Klyce's responsive ear have provided audiences with some of the more subtle but no less noteworthy feature sound designs in recent years. Most notably, 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button', 'The Social Network', and most recently 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo' have been proof that explosions and car crashes aren't necessarily essential to the creation of effective sound. All of these films are successful in aurally filling a space that is created by the camera. Whether it be the open sea in 'Benjamin Button' or Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room in 'The Social Network', the sound is appropriate to the space making the scene it more accessible to the listener. The listener is able to subconsciously accept the sound they are hearing and thus able to concentrate their focus elsewhere. Upon watching these select scenes using Chion's masking method though, it becomes clear not only just how full of sound they are, but also how non-intrusive the overall design is in the larger context of the film as a whole.
Klyce himself even highlighted his use of subtlety in a short insight into the sound of 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo' recorded for the Soundworks Collection late last year. In the video, he referenced a scene in which Mikael (Daniel Craig) visits Lisbeth (Rooney) at her apartment for the first time. He mentions a passing train in the background as Mikael enters and how this is used to give the viewer a point of reference as far her 'urban residence' is concerned. For someone who is studying sound design for the first time, to hear these subtleties explained by their designer is true influence. After watching the scene and hearing it explained, it goes a long way as far as being able to recognise the importance of sound in any scene and how integral a strong sound design is from a storytelling point of view.
The sound in Refn's films takes a similar stance. Refn though, is a director who likes to challenge the viewers senses by forcing you to accept the unnatural as realistic. Aurally (and visually), natural inconsistencies occur frequently without any explanation, however they are never outstanding enough to be questioned at the time. The sound (however unnatural it is) is always in perfect context so as not to alarm the viewer as they partake in the film. It is only afterwards and upon repeat viewings that we are able to understand the lengths Refn and his sound team go to for the sake of creating a visceral movie experience.
'Bronson' contains early examples of this use of sound in Refn's work. One fight scene in particular matches body shots to the beats of the accompanying soundtrack. Unnatural as these sound effects were, considering the context, they still contained the necessary force to convey the ultraviolence of the sequence. The pounding bass beat of the soundtrack slings home the brute force of Charles Bronson as he single handedly takes down half a dozen men.
Further and far more impressive (and subtle) use of 'unnatural sound selection' can be found in Refn's 'Drive'. Throughout the film, the case is simple. You only hear what Refn wants you to hear. And what you do hear, you only hear the way he wants you to hear it.
In the opening getaway scene, there are moments of tension on both ends of the spectrum. Driver creeps along so as to not draw attention from police, and proceeds to drop the hammer and try to outmanoeuvre them as they weave their way through central Los Angeles; the main difference in sound being how much of the engine noise Refn allows you to hear. During the quieter moments of this scene, you will not hear the engine at all. It's on, and the car is being driven, but Refn withholds the sound of it from us. Why? So that the impact of the suddenly increasing RPM as he charges away from the police tail has the viewer gripping their seats as the intensity level (pardon the pun) completely shifts gears. In a matter of seconds, the sound of the entire film goes from deathly quiet to rip roaringly, insanely loud, echoing the story's sudden change of pace.
This technique, directly influenced by this scene, is something that we desperately wanted to try out in our film. Not by any means in an effort to try and copy or rip off Refn's film, but to set ourselves the challenge of achieving the same level of impact, through sound, that was achieved by one of the years (if not the decade's) best sounding films.
Once we had concluded our initial research, we set about revising our story to make it more tangibly shootable. Originally, we had scripted an entire first scene between the focal character and a female accomplice who he parts way with before the film begins to concentrate solely on the 'man with briefcase'. This was eventually scrapped for two reasons. Firstly, though we were concerned with a tight narrative, we felt that expositional dialogue was not a way in which we wanted to tell our story. Both being fans of dialogue, it was a tough decision to make, but the eventual decision to scrap it meant that the sound design would be able to play a larger part in the overall narrative.
We settled on two locations following a brief city scout, but always had the same two places in mind. St Crispin's House on Duke Street in Norwich would provide the setting for our 'office exit' scene, a scene in which our main character leaves a building and makes his way across a car park. For our climactic multi-story pursuit, the St Andrew's car park in Norwich provided the most camera friendly environment. Also, their management were instantly encouragable of our intention to film on their premises and we were allowed to record there extensively on two separate occasions.
The only unorthodox element of our preparation was our decision to not storyboard this particular project. The reason for this was purely based on the fact the the film's visuals carried no weight and that we wanted to experiment in a point and shoot environment. It's no secret that there are directors out there who don't storyboard at all, the most relevant example again being Nicolas Winding Refn's 'Drive', a film from which we were already drawing direct influences from in regards to our own sound design.
Production
While we fully understand the importance of storyboarding as it provides necessary structure when preparing and planning a shoot, we thought it would be exciting to go to our locations with detailed outlines of the scenes in our mind and be able to try things out on the spot. Furthermore, with the term's emphasis being on sound design, after one failed attempt at recording sound whilst filming, we set ourself the challenge of filming and then recording sound separately. This consisted of a two man shoot one day, and then returning to our locations a few days later to retrace our steps and capture the sounds that we wanted after reviewing an initial edit of the visuals.
The filming went almost 100% according to our original plan. We encountered bad weather one day, and had to scrap one of our potential locations due to not being granted permission by the Anglia Square management. We were only looking to shoot one shot there however (a shot to show the character's progression between our two main locations), and quickly found a suitable replacement in the form of the Duke Street university library where we used an upstairs window as a POV vantage point as the character's movements are tracked as he crosses and then makes his way down the road.
The security teams at both the St Crispin's building and St Andrew's car park were only too happy to let us film on their premises provided we didn't cause any disturbance, and we happily returned the favour by keeping our shoots on their property as short as possible with both locations experience a hefty 9 to 5 bustle on a day to day basis.
We did experience lengthy waits to record sound on a few occasions, but these were limited to patiently waiting for lifts and stair wells to be unoccupied so that we could record certain sequences without any unwanted background noise. As all of the background noise heard in the film was to be recorded separately as 'ambience', it was necessary to wait for absolute silence before recording the sound effects that were to be layered on top of said ambience in post production.
Favourably, we succeeded in our plan for a two day shoot without any major glitches or hangups, and were able to proceed to post without the need for any reshoots or rerecording.
Post Production
Post was where this particular project really began to find its purpose and shape. At this point, I personally began to take the proverbial 'back seat' so that Carl could mould our footage into an actual film. This was not a route that either of us had planned, but seeing as I had been in front of the camera during filming having chosen myself to portray our lone character, Carl was responsible for the actual photography. Having played this role during the production process, it made more sense for him to take the footage home and review it. Carl's first edit was largely pleasing, combining narrative progression ideas we had both pitched, and told the story exactly how we had originally envisioned. This was due to a good communication between the two of us during both the development and production stages, and agreeing on how to move forward before the 'cameras were rolling'. It meant that post production was able to proceed smoothly without the need to compromise on anything.
By this point, I had started to take the lead in the non narrative post production stage on both the visual and sound editing fronts. This meant that Carl was also in charge of constructing the initial sound edit of our narrative piece. We did liaise on a day to day basis from this point, sharing ideas and criticisms and editing the pieces we were responsible for respectively. Whereas each of us were largely responsible for our own individual sound designs, we were both equally as active in each others work to the point where we feel that both sound designs can be credited to us both on account of the amount of creative input we had, as well as the support we gave each other over the course of both projects' post production phases.
Having recorded all of the sound live, on location, all of the sound in 'Interception' seems to have the same depth to it when it is listened back to. This, I think, makes the film's sound seem as natural as the progression of the visual edit. Shooting on locations that were filled with dark browns, greys and black, the sound design therefore was able to mimic the visuals with an aural consistency to match from beginning to end.
The only challenge I'd really say we faced in post was the compacting the sound into the range of between -20db and -6db (the gunshot aside). It was completely doable, but as post wore on we both began to concern ourselves with how compressing all of the film's sound into this specified range would affect the overall dynamic we were trying to achieve. We wanted our quiet moments to be atmospheric, and our loud moments to pack an unexpected aural punch.
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