The film I've chosen for my final project is the first film that I made at Syracuse, a psychological thriller called Devout. Inspired by dark thrillers such as The Night of the Hunter, the film is very bleak and is shot in with a fairly high contrast of black and white hues. I aim to create a sound piece to mirror the bleakness and eery nature of the film while matching the action in a fairly concrete but occasionally abstract manner.
In the film, a young man prepares to murder his girlfriend after learning that she cheated on him. The first scene is a montage that depicts the young man's fear as he prepares to kill her while she fools around with another man, with heavy emphasis on his knife and its burial. In the following scene, the young man sees a deathly serious priest as he is walking back to his apartment; he becomes angered with the priest's unbreakable stare and charges toward him, only for him to disappear. In the final scene the young man's psychosis has been exacerbated to the point that he is an emotional and mental wreck. As he is sipping a coffee he is confronted by the priest who had appeared to vanish, and he takes the young man's hands in his, their expressions confirming forgiveness. The camera then pushes out to reveal that there is no priest sitting across from the young man, who is then apprehended by two other young men who notice his picture in the paper.
Structurally, the film is composed of three distinct scenes, which could be both a positive and negative in designing a sound piece to accompany it. Each scene has a distinct feeling to it, though they are all very closely related in terms of mood and texture. The first scene is hurried and somewhat frenetic, the second scene is more suspenseful and mysterious and the third scene is more unnerving and ambiguous. They are fairly similar to one another in feeling, however, so I don't imagine that crafting each scene will be enormously difficult. The most difficult aspect will be ensuring that they work together well, ensuring that none of the transitions are confusing in the least. Each scene will be a single audio track.
For the first scene (0:00-1:24), I would like to continue with bolder, more orchestral notes similar to the current track. Harsher, reverberated strings could compliment it well, though it should be defined by a larger melding of powerful instruments to reflect the heavy emotional tension. Relative to the next two scenes, which rely more on natural sounds, the first scene might seem like something of an aberration when one reflects on it, though I have never noticed it in dozens of viewings of the film; it merely a concern.
The next scene (1:25-2:36) contains more natural, synch sound, but my project will not include and foley work. I can imagine manipulating an instrument that can sound strong and slow reverberated. The music will be slightly lower, however, as the viewer is encouraged to acclimate to a more realistic environment. I would like to maintain the somewhat jarring sound that coincides with the wide shot of the priest's arrival. For the final scene (2:37-4:06) I would like to record restaurant sound and manipulate it in a more abstract manner that makes it slyly distracting in order to again accentuate the arrival of the priest. The sound then would be much lower and likely more orchestral, similar to the first scene, though much more mysterious.
While one might say that using a silent film as a template is an advantage, I don't believe that it is any easer as there is much more importance played on the music, as it plays a much larger storytelling role. It's depended on to give the viewer the proper feeling towards the images in the absence of dialogue and I am excited to see how effectively I can mimic the feeling of the images sonically.
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