In the film Flatliners, now in theaters, a group of medical students seek the answer to that question by intentionally stopping their hearts for a specified amount of time. Their near-death experiences are extraordinary but quickly turn dark when elements from the afterlife follow them back into their everyday lives.
6 comments:
I like how the designer mentioned at the end that they decided not to use a heartbeat sound as a central motif. Especially in a film called “Flatliners” where the title references a heartbeat that is quite impressive. The idea of two different worlds coexisting together is a tough trick to pull off. I think that the plan of giving each character their own “atmosphere” to the other world makes this much easier to pull off and ends with a better result. I would love to have been able to go around as a fly on the wall while they were planning and finding foley sounds. It’s so crazy where some of the sounds come from, especially when they are sometimes nothing like what they end up sounding like. The atmosphere they have described fits the two world element that is the main interest of the movie.
I just looked this movie up, because the trailer looked super cool and I wanted to see it, but it got a 4% on Rotten Tomatoes. I'll probably still see it because I think it is a really cool concept. I really love articles that discuss how sound plays a huge part in television and film in ways that we as an audience don't even entirely notice. In most movies, there is sound and music pretty much throughout, and it shapes the tone of what is happening in any specific moment. In the trailer for this film, the music creates a complete shift from the first half to the second half. The first half has very loud techno/pop music that has a very sci fi but still party-ish tone. Then there is a very clear division when the music gets much quieter and switches to the typical horrific, shrill music that gets put into horror trailers. If I see this movie, I will be very interested to see how the sound designer creates the divide between the two worlds and realities.
I did not go to see this movie (mostly because, as mentioned above, it got terrible reviews), but I appreciate the work the sound designers did to create this sort of creepy, ethereal world. I like how the designers wanted to pull together the sort of conscious world and the world after flat-lining with sound motifs, and how those sound motifs were unique to each character. I think the use of those motifs, especially the "flat line" noise could really powerfully pull together two realities that exist on opposite extremes. I saw Dunkirk at an Imax theatre last summer, and I really think the Imax sound experience enhanced the sound design of the movie. One of the motifs that the sound designers on that movie used was a sort of low, omnipresent, ominous bass (kudos to that bass soloist as well) and a ticking clock that would fade in and out. The motifs did a great job of enhancing the tension between the officers and trepidation felt by the men on the beach.
Directionality of sound really interest me. Sometimes it is where the sound is coming from that adds that scare factor and the sound itself is almost secondary. I really want to mess around with direction of sound more. This movie sounded really interesting., Sound can make or break a movie and it is one of the things that is overlooked as a whole. Reading this article and learning more about the team that comes together to me the sound design for a movie was interesting. There are so many individual components to a design that people can get more specialized within the field. I found that interesting. I want to get a huge general knowledge of all aspects of sound but then if I find an area that I love its cool to see that I could specialize in it.
The concept alone behind flatliners is very intriguing. We don’t know what happens upon death or what it is like. So, designing the sound for it had to have been challenging. However, the way that sound was approached was very different than I imagined. The movie is a very conceptual based movie since there are no answers to what it is exploring and so one would assume that sound might reflect that because they can very free with interpreting it. That isn’t the case though; the designers as they explained go about it in a very methodical way. The person dies in an MRI machine and so it makes sense that the sound it produces is in some way around when the characters are dead. It is an intrinsic part of the experience that became the base of it rather than a part of it. That not only is very practical and methodical in coming up with the sound for it but it is also conceptual as well because of how they can alter that noise to bleed into the rest of the experience which is conceptual in nature. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into it and it is very interesting to see the process and ideas that occurred as was explained through the questions the sound designers answered.
Sound in general is an element of theatre and media that I have almost no connection to. It is hard for me to understand, both creatively and technically, so it is very cool to have a window into that world. The amount of care sound designers put into their work, the amount of nuance they have to understand and execute is incredible and complicated. Developing a concept for sound must be tricky, to be able to come up with something creative yet still understandable to the vast audience a movie may draw. To me, sound is even more complicated because you cannot draw it out visually. Costumes and sets can be drawn out, paint treatments can be sampled, even lighting can be drawn or represented through a plot. How can you describe to someone else a sound you want to create?
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