Thoughts About Audio Storytelling
I watched both the Touch of Evil and Touch of Evil 1958 the Orson Welles version. Found both to be interesting but even more so listening instead of watching. I felt with the first version it was an excellent choice of theme music as it made you anticipate what is going to happen. Your mind was instantly ready for something. You hear lots of laughter, cars, goats, the cops and their whistles, horns blowing and people talking and then bam an explosion! Totally unexpected and off line of what seemed to be going on with all the sounds and music. The second version there was a little laughter, cars, street noise and you may see people talking but you don’t really hear them. This kept the scene low-key and dramatic. It was a dramatic fade in and gets stronger and more of a beat going that stays constant. The music kind of overpowers the sounds you need to hear.
An importance in noir film I believe are the scenes and the sound effects. These create the ambiance for you and allow you to feel and believe that you are in the room with them if you are only listening to audio and not watching anything. I think about noir audio as melodramatic, music, nighttime street scenes, it’s always dark and lonely and mean sounding! Spaces and moods build audio presence and connects you to the story and what is going on. Noir is the tone an the mood – starts low key and then moves to a more high key audio/scene.
I read The Ambience of Film Noir and combine those thoughts into the above review of what I watched.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2DPSqKLS_g7d1lGNDVlYTA0ZEU/view
I also listened to the Wednesday night ds106radio show. I enjoyed listening and tweeting along but continuously felt like I wasn’t connected because I had no way of knowing if I was doing things right for this as it was my first time tuning in. At one point I even tweeted -“can anybody see me” hoping for some sort of tweet back . . . It wasn’t until Bond sent the list the next day with the participants that I knew things were done right. I was prepared to try again and listen to another one if necessary.
A good example of this would be Spielberg’s Close Encounter of the Third Kind.