1. Introduction
Kill Bill, The Matrix, and Fight Club are three films that have acted as important inspirations for Mighty Antlers, and each of these films has played a role in the development of the project. The common workflows and methodologies, as well as a comparative study of these works with Mighty Antlers, will be examined in this production analysis. Following that, I'll discuss a few of the diegetic and non-diegetic choices that I made, as well as some technical considerations. At the end of the project, I'll reflect on the finished product and any improvements that could be implemented.
2. Mighty Antlers vs Kill Bill
Violence is a recurring theme throughout Quentin Tarantino's filmography. Tarantino employs a variety of techniques to convey both euphoric and disturbing violence. Similarly, in Mighty Antlers, the sound design is a significant factor in how we perceive this violence. The sound design in Kill Bill (2003) is influenced by martial arts movies. Kill Bill’s sound designer Stateman in an interview said: "We watched videotapes of '60s- and '70s-era karate films” (filmsound.org, n.d.). I examined Tarantino's two unique styles of violence for my project: exciting violence and terrifying violence. In Kill Bill (2003), during the fight with the Crazy 88, for example: Oftentimes in this scene, exciting violence is accompanied by added sound design. While the sounds of discomforting violence are always rooted in reality. It all comes down to the moment's intent. Whichever style of sound design is used is an instant indicator of the intention behind the scenes. “The effectiveness of the designer lies in recognizing the varying metaphoric values of different sound elements and in combining these elements to tell the right story” (Maribeth Back and D. Des, n.d.). In Kill Bill and Mighty Antlers, sound design is used to match and reinforce the tone. In Quentin Tarantino's films, Statesman alternates between the two factors consistently. Likewise in Mighty Antlers, I layered the realistic sound of the celery, bacon, and red pepper, with metallic, industrial noises and effects created with synthesizers. For instance, at minute 2.14, when the stag smashes the man to the ground., I added a layer of the sound of a chainsaw to the mix. Also because “Nonliteral, or metaphoric, the sound is often more effective for dramatic purposes than sound that literally matches the object represented”. (Beauchamp, p. 21). As with Kill Bill, the enhanced sound design in Mighty Antlers contributes to the catharsis that comes from witnessing the man receive his punishment from the devil stag. Viers (2018), writes that "sound designers frequently layer animal growls in explosions." With this in mind, I offset-layered the punches thrown against the demon stag with the sound of an actual deer. However, I kept it in the background because I didn't want it to sound too literal. The sound design is influencing how we, as an audience, react to the moment. Cohen (2011), one of the sound designers of Kill Bill, states that occasionally, progressively reducing ambient noises, can help to focus the scene more and more on the interaction between the characters. That is when “hyper-reality details can help the audience feel closer to the characters”. There are a few scenes when I applied this concept to Mighty Antlers. A significant scene to use as an illustration is the one that occurs about minute 1.40, just before the demon stag crashes the man outside of the vehicle and into the ground. Slowly, the sound of the Theremin and the Gong, are fading away until we have silence and the consequent build-up for the jump scare.
3. Mighty Antlers vs The Matrix
Like Kill Bill, The Matrix is heavily influenced by genre filmmaking. One, in particular, is Hong Kong action. Martial arts films were a major influence on the Wachowskis. "If the characters in The Matrix can have information instantaneously downloaded into their heads, they should, for example, be able to be as good a Kung Fu master as Jackie Chan," says Larry Wachowski. The Wachowskis got one of the top Hong Kong stunt specialists in both Kung Fu and wire-stunt work, Yuen Woo-ping, to collaborate in The Matrix (www.whoaisnotme.net, 1999). For The Matrix, sound designer and supervising sound editor Dane Davis did not want to repeat sound effects from the genres they were influenced by, even if they were based on such genres. To give the film a distinctive flavour, Davis said “We intended to develop all of the film's sound effects from scratch” (Buskin, 1998). They not only developed their versions, but they also made a distinct alteration in the sound of those effects. Traditional martial arts films use lower-pitched swings and higher-pitched connecting blows. However, this seems to be inverted in The Matrix, the punches that hit are far lower in pitch, which provides an inflated sensation of strength. Similarly, In Mighty Antlers, I add two different layers of swings.
I duplicated one of the layers and divided it into two tracks, one with the regular pitch of the sound, and the other with two octaves below. The higher pitch is synchronized with the empty swings, and the lower pitch layer is with the landing swings. I aimed to create a sensation comparable to the punches in “The Matrix”, where the characters seem to possess superhuman speed and strength.
Another scene that I explored for Mighty Antlers is the “lobby scene” in Matrix for a “clarity” reason.
The issue in the fight scene in Mighty Antlers was to maintain clarity and the lobby scene is the best illustration of this.
Beauchamp (p. 23) states that “knowing when the sound should advertise or smooth a cut is essential to the design”.
Davis, on the other hand, was able to achieve clarity in the mix by shifting from places of maximum volume to silence.
For example, in this sequence, there are numerous instances where the music is cut off.
In the sound mix, there's a short interval of silence, and then again the chaotic action with gunfires. However, this little pause increases considerable expectations.
The application of this notion can be found in minute 2.20 of Mighty Antlers.
As a result, allowing the music to sink into the silence before rising to a peak, enhances the excitement of the fight between the man and the devil stag.
How a piece of music works and how it creates tension and release is critical (Borquez, 2013). Silences aren't simply employed as a way to build to the peaks of activity; they're also a place for contemplation and reflection. Again at minute 2.50 of Mighty Antlers, we have the application of this concept that will be further explained at the end of the next chapter.
4. Mighty Antlers vs Fight Club
The majority of fights in The Fight Club take place between sympathetic opponents. As a consequence, in addition to all of the agony, the Foley team had to communicate a broad sense of pleasure and enthusiasm. However, their original search for sonic realism sometimes developed into auditory surrealism (Filmsound.org).
“You don't want it to be just one long 20 or 30-second ear-splitting thing. It has to be loud and visceral, but at the same time, it also has to be spooky, allowing for slow-motion shots intercut with ones at regular speed” (Klyce, R., n.d.).
Borquez (2013) states that It's important for a sound designer not to go "extremely literal" when it comes to creating sound. Combining sounds with various textures and tones is essential.
Ren Klyce, the sound designer for Fight Club, used rubber bands, zips, and other particular sounds in the scene of the automobile collision.
He says “Strange noises are happening, that have nothing to do with the car, it’s just texture, that sounds like things that are coming at you” (INDEPTH Sound Design, 2020).
I obtained a similar effect In Mighty Antlers, in the scene where the Man is hitting the Stag with his car. I copied the sound of the very last crash of the devil deer against the car, which comprehends multiple layers of metal objects and reversed it. The reverse effect is applied also to the chorus in the music using “The famous pre-verb effect used in the horror genre involves reversing dialogue, adding reverb, and re-reversing the dialogue so we hear the reverb before the dialogue” (Beauchamp, p. 122). We can see this at minute 1.41, before the first punch.
Another Fight Club scene that inspires me in the sound design of Mighty Antlers is the “Angel face beating” scene. In that scene, when the protagonist is hitting the face of his opponent, “the sounds goes from naturalistic to this other place, where there is its interior monologue”. Klyce obtains this with the use of reverb, in order to “force the audience in a certain perspective”.
In light of this, I used reverb in the last combat scene, when the Man grabs the antlers. This was done to draw the audience in, to immerse them in that "life-or-death" moment, and to focus their attention on the protagonist's inability to defeat the evil stag and his struggle for survival; I wanted to generate empathy for him. Because the Clip, in my interpretation, is a parable of resurrection. However, In order to enhance this more, I could remove the sounds of the steps completely.
5. Considerations of some diegetic and non-diegetic choices
I conducted some research into the stag's role in mediaeval folklore and decided to include the radio speech at the beginning. To affect the audience by infusing the narrative with a mystical, esoteric connotation. I paid particular attention when recording the steps because I noticed that the more precisely I was matching the steps with each movement, the more fluid the scenes became. I used pitch shifting on the steps to “create variation in repetitive sounds” (Beauchamp, p. 123).
At the beginning of the video, a short phrase with a melody represents a sound design cliche. “Dies Irae” is a Gregorian chant of the VIII century, it was used for funerals.
The part that is commonly used is constituted by the first 4 notes: F E F D (Ludwing, A., 2021). This particular melody is associated with death in popular culture. It may be found in several well-known film scores, where it is used to strongly emphasise specific scenes. In this instance, my allusion was to the theme heard in the opening sequence of the film "Shining” (1980), which was composed by Wendy Carlos (García, 2021).
For the reasons I previously stated, I placed the song during the opening credits to introduce the film's sinister theme and its main character.
“By playing on the aural nerves with symbolic sounds and noises the psychological reaction of the audience is controlled and varied according to the dramatic and emotional needs of the cartoon story” (Isaza, 2010).
In the fight scene, a Mickey Mouse-style technique is employed by the soundtrack. This is because these sequences necessitate fast and shifting music.
“At the conclusion of the film, music is often used to promote closure and to transition the audience back to reality, in the same way, a hypnotist brings his patient back by counting down from ten” (Beauchamp, p. 20).
The track at the end of the movie I believe it fits the protagonist's last, melancholy expression. I intended to portray my perception of the film through this final song, which is a storey about loneliness, rage, and revelation.
6. Considerations on sweetening and panning
"Some sounds are dull in real life, you need something to add to sell the effect, this is called sweetening" (Ric Viers, p. 207)
To amplify the punches' effect, I grouped them into a group bus into which I inserted an emulation of the SSL Bus compressor to glue all the punches together. However, dynamic range is reduced as a result of compression, which reduces expressiveness (Maribeth Back and D. Des, n.d.). To achieve a meaty-like sound, the sound's frequency content has been manipulated to add more amplitude in the middle ranges, between 1000 and 3000 Hz (Maribeth Back and D. Des, n.d.).
Additionally, I used a transient shaper to shape the punches' transients, particularly the crunchiness of the bones break and allowed them to cut through the mix. However, when paired with the other noises, clipping was occurring. To maintain the density and snapping of the hits while minimizing the effect on the limiter, I introduced a Clipper. As a result, I was able to "square off the transient" to avoid the limiter to compressing the dynamic range to earlier, and consequently reduce too much the dynamic range (Houghton, 2015). This processing laid the groundwork for the punches to be realistic and perform as intended.
“The sweet spot - or in some cases the sweet area - is the area in which listeners get a good and consistent impression of the directions and distances to individual sources of a mix” (Lund, 2021)
A key part of localization is determining how far and in what direction the listener thinks they are from a certain point. Under cinema conditions, it is difficult to tell if a signal that appears just in one of the surroundings is coming from the front, the side, or behind you. Many audience members will not agree on the same point. (Lund, 2021)
One of the most difficult problems I encountered was determining an appropriate listening position for panning in 5.1. Lund (2021) believes that more trials should be undertaken to establish exactly what can be achieved in terms of localization and widening of the sweet spot. I did not adhere to any particular system while panning; rather, I experimented, in some cases with micro-automation of the sound effects, because “Unlike dialogue and underscore, SFX are routinely panned dynamically to follow the objects they represent. When panned dynamically, sound effects enhance the perception of motion and spatial perspective implied on-screen” (Beauchamp, p. 148). I applied pan automation also to the reverb, and automated for each track the dry/wet and decay parameters, to “allow for great flexibility” and to obtain “the sonic equivalent of placing each sound in its own room” (Beauchamp, p. 121).
7. Reflective Evaluation of the final product
“As sound designers, we become bothered by complex questions about alignment, phase, clicks, and timbres that most people could not interpret or care about, so the task of a sound designer involves a lot of critical listening (Farnell, 2010)”
After I watched the video of Mighty Antlers multiple times, I employed the technique that Rice Viers reported in his book “The sound effect Bible” on page 181.
He called this technique “The editing Mantra” and consists in:
● Listen critically
● Identify clicks pops and error
● Signal process (EQ and compressor)
● Trim crop the file
● Examine fade, in fade out
● Normalize/Name file
I developed the project entirely in Logic X and Pro Tools, as well as in the Bankstock studios' Avid S4, C24 and EMP studios. The final section of panning in 5.1 was created in Avid S4.
In general, I'm pleased with the product’s outcome. If I had more time, I would invest it in optimizing panning, layering and improving certain aspects of the mix.
For instance, the ambience. I would spend more time thinking about better ways to pan the ambience, in relation to the spectator, like Beauchamp (p. 149) suggests: “When ambience is panned in the screen channels, the audience can be made to feel like spectators. When ambience is placed in both the screens and the surround, the audience feels as if they have been placed within the scene.”
For layering, I would experiment more, for example using more semantic sounds.
Additionally, the sub in the Avid S4 was not working properly, so I'm not 100% certain of the sub kick levels and the low end in general, especially of the car sound.