REFLECTIVE VLOG
The following is a reflective piece on my time as Sound Designer for the short film, Hiraeth (2019).
Hiraeth is a short drama that follows Arthur, a retired engineer stuck in a monotonous existence following the loss of his wife. In an effort to remain connected with his late wife, Arthur recluses into the family home they had built together, much to the detriment of his well being. In her last effort to reconnect, Arthur's daughter, Emma, threatens to sell her shares of the home. This forces Arthur to undergo reflection, seeking answers from his past.
Upon joining the crew, it became clear that Hiraeth would be a grounded character-driven story with a visual aesthetic centered around realism. To help support this, I opted to design a minimalist soundscape that was motivated by mostly diegetic sounds one would expect to hear in that world.
With this in mind, my main objectives were:
To create a sense of intimacy and proximity between the characters and the audience through sound.
To create an emotive soundscape of mostly diegetic sounds, to keep in the spirit of the film’s grounded aesthetic as well as to play at my strengths as a sound designer.
Due to costs, duvets were used in place of sound blankets.
Considering that the short film was just over 10 minutes, perhaps one of the key challenges for sound was to quickly establish our drama’s tone and steady pace. It became clear in pre-production that we had a lot to pack into just 10 minutes but needed to allow for moments to breathe. Due to this, much of my research went into controlling the perception of time as well as into clearly establishing the tone sonically.
From my pre-production assignment, I looked into Greg Smith’s “Mood cue approach” to assist the audience into hopefully embracing the mood and tone of the film through sound. In said assignment, I discuss how Smith suggests that by ‘redundantly’ serving the audience with ‘emotion markers’ one can elicit ‘brief moments of emotion to help maintain a ‘predisposition towards’ a certain mood (2003, pp. 44-45).
From Michel Chion I looked at techniques designed to control the perceived pace of the film through just diegetic sounds. Chion states that “a sound with a regular pulse tends to be predictable and creates less temporal animation”. This technique would help to establish to the audience the perception of a steady paced drama not afraid to linger in moments to take in its subtleties.
Consider these two approaches when watching the second video.
There was one instance where I had to depart from my second objective. Due to the nature of footage we managed to capture, our edit had to depart from the script (during the second act), in favour of a sequence between Arthur’s past and present. This did wonders for our story however it’s execution felt somewhat disjointed and unrelated, thus losing the impact of its revelations. I was unable to harmonies the sequence on purely diegetic sounds, and so I included a relevant slow-to-rise score that acted as a glue, encouraging the audience to look at these different scenes as one. While I was sad to momentarily depart from my objective, it was ultimately an easy decision for the sake of the film.
