On Wednesday, October 29, 2014, I visited the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria. This museum was something I didn't expect. Our tour guide showed us things I haven't seen before and knew many things about the things they showed.
Though I enjoyed many things within in the museum something I found extremely interesting and fascinating was when our tour guide showed us a scene from Titanic (1997). In this scene he showed us what it took to make a while scene come together with the different elements of sound.
At the time, I didn't have a vast knowledge of how hard it was to to put a scene together and how many different elements a scene had. Most of this scene, he told us, was recorded with ADR. Alot of the sounds were recorded within an soundbooth and then later replaced in the final take.
There were about five different tracks within the scene. Two for music, one for the Foley Artists, one for music and one more for sound effects. If any of these tracks were missing, the scene would be different and incomplete.
After playing the scene we had to figure out where each of these sounds were coming from, when we finally learn, it amazed me. Most of the sounds that we heard, I would have never thought to put in the scene. When Kate Winslet's character falls, it sound like an actual person falling, but take away all the other sounds and it sound fake. We soon learned that the sound was made by a sack of potatoes tied to a chair and then that chair being tipped over.
When the pipe was falling down, it made a sound that was very hard to detect. Many people had different thoughts of what it could be. We were then told that it was a slowed down track of an elephants blowing it's horn. I would have never thought of that, it sounds so real and unlike an elephant.
A sound most of us had guessed was when the wires snapped. This sound was one of a trains horn. Though in the full scene with all of the sounds it was hard to tell. But when the sound was isolated it was easy to identify it was a train's horn.
Watching a movie and listening to all the sounds, make it easy. You think I'll just google a pipe falling. It's not that easy. Being on the editing side of a movie, you realize how hard it actually it to edit a movie and make it all believable.