Pressure Project 3: Going to the Movies
Posted: April 13, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For pressure project 3, I set out to tell a clear story using only sound. I’d done a similar project once before a handful of years ago and was in the middle of teaching sound design to my Introduction to Production Design class, so I felt fortunate to have a little experience and to be in the correct mindset. I wanted to make sure there was a clear narrative flow and that the narrative was fleshed out completely with details. I opted for a realistic soundscape, a journey, because it felt, to me, the most logical way to organize the sounds in the way I wanted to.
In terms of what it would be, I started broadly thinking about what culture thing I might create a story for. As I mentioned in class, I did originally consider doing a kind of ancestral origin story. I first considered doing a story about/for my great grandparents who came to the United States from Croatia. The initial thought was to follow them from a small town there, across the ocean, to Ellis Island, where they landed, and then perhaps onto the train and to Milwaukee (even though that skips a portion of their story). Ultimately, part of why I abandoned this idea was because it felt too sweeping for two minutes, and I started to realize that a lot of what I would want for that story would have to be recorded, rather than found.
In the end, I decided to think much smaller, about a cultural experience about me, specifically. Because I still had this idea of a “journey” in my head, I came to the idea of walking to the movies. Being able to walk to an independent movie house, preferably an old one, is something I look for when we’re moving somewhere new, so it felt like the right way to go. I decided to age up the movie theatre in my head a bit to play up the soundscape; quiet chairs and doors didn’t seem as interesting as someplace that needs a healthy round of WD40. The theatres for the last three places I’ve lived are pictured below.
Neighborhood Theatres
With a story in mind, I set out to figure out how to actually make the sound story. With a decent amount of digging around, I finally remembered that the program I’d used in the past was Audacity, so I at least knew it would be free and relatively accessible. From there, I searched out sounds on the sound effects websites I’d given my students to use (YouTube Sound Library, Freesound, Free Music Archive, etc.). I used Audacity to get the sound file from the movie I wanted to use at the end of the piece, which from The Women (1939). The main challenge I faced was that I’ve personally only worked with sound once before maybe four years ago when I took a class very much like the one I’m teaching now. The other is that it’s always harder than you want it to be to find the right sound you’re looking for. I was mindful of the relatively limited time I had to work on the project and tried to work as quickly as I could to make a list of sound I felt I needed and try to track them down. I also challenged myself to make the sound locational in the piece, to work with levels and placement so that it felt as if it was actually happening to the listener. In some ways, this was the easiest part of the project to do. For me, it was easy to pick out when a sound wasn’t where I wanted it to be or something was too loud or quiet to my mind’s eye.
I didn’t keep careful track of how my time worked out or was split up. I did the project, more or less, straight through, moving between tasks as it made sense. I designed it mostly from start to finish, rather than jumping around, finding a sound, placing it, and editing it. I shifted lengths and things like that as I went, and I spent maybe half an hour at the end fine tuning things and making sure the timing made sense.
A Smattering of the Sounds
During the presentation, the class understood that a journey was happening and, eventually, that we were at the movies. They experienced this realization at slightly different points, though it universally seemed to happen once we had gone through the theatre doors and into the theatre itself. They reported that the levels and sound placement worked, that they knew they were inside of an enclosed space. I think the variety of information was also pleasing, in terms of the inclusion of social interactions, environmental information, the transitions between places, etc. I think the inclusion of a visual would have made the sound story come into focus much more quickly. If I had included a picture of a movie theatre, or, better, the painting I had in my head (below), I think the whole journey would have been extremely clear. As it was, once I explained it, I think all the choices made sense and told the story I was trying to tell.
Overall, I think the project was successful, though perhaps in need of visual accompaniment, particularly if this kind of movie going isn’t your usual thing. I also think one of the effects, the popcorn machine in the lobby, needed adjusting; I was worried about it being too loud and overcorrected.
New York Movie (Edward Hopper, 1939)