Museum of the Moving Image

The Museum of the Moving Image has current ongoing exhibition, "Behind the Screen." It was interesting exhibition because it required the audiences’ participation. In this post, I would like to write about the demonstrations I participated in the museum.

 Through the MEDIA 150 class, I could have the live demonstrations by the museum staff, which was about the sound editing in the movie Titanic (1997). The museum staff showed a clip of Titanic first. He explained about the sound layers, which were the dialogue, music, sound effect, loop and foley. He set up the sound so only one layer of the sound could come out and he repeated with the other layers of the sound. It was interesting that dialogue had huge difficulty to carry out the emotions by itself and the combination of the sound creates different effect. Moreover, the way director Cameron uses sound effect was amazed me. For example, putting animal sound when the Titanic was sinking gave the ship a sense of living object. Also, when the ropes connected to the ship fell down into the water, the sound from the ropes is similar to the gun fire sound to represent the sense of danger. I did not know it is impossible to record sound at the field. All the background sounds we hear in the movie, such as the door slam sound, were made in the studio. In the Tatinic, the sound of Rose falling down on the floor also made by chair and big sacks so it could create gradual sound of body parts that touches floor at the different time.  

When I watch movies, I had paid attention on only the movie scenes. After this exhibition, I realized that sound is as important as movie to create proper mood and emotions.