A Sound Rant

To wind down last night I watched THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK on my portable dvd player in my room.

(Don't know why I was in the mood for that particular movie, I just was. Usually when I feel like watching dinosaurs terrorize humankind I watch JP III. I've seen the first movie TOO many times, so I don't really watch it anymore. Besides, if I'm in the mood to visit Jurassic Park I've got the book-on-cd version of Michael Crichton's novel, read by John Heard. It's abridged, running, like, 3 hours TRT, and yet it still packs 50% more story and action that the movie was able to fit in! Plus, it's darker in tone with a more scientific bent -- like most of Crichton's work. GOOD STUFF!)

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this viewing last night!

There are a couple of reliable scare moments in LOST WORLD that are gaurenteed to make me jump, but what surprised me most was how much I got into just the action of the movie! I was really interested the whole way through! When I saw the movie in the theater I was disappointed, and when I watched it on VHS or dvd afterward it was usually just because I wanted to watch dinosaurs and had seen the first one too many times.

But last night, I really dug on the flick!

And I think what made it work was the headphones!

Let me explain a bit:

When I saw the American version of GODZILLA on the Big Screen the first 3 times, I LOVED it! I had a blast! I really enjoyed that movie!!! I kid you not.

On the Big Screen.

When I watched in on VHS, and later on dvd, I wan't impressed AT ALL. I grew to loath the flick. Well, not loath it... It was more like I pittied it for all it's short-comings. For all the ways it failed us, the audience, when it so enthusiastically thought it was being revolutionary or something. It took a lot of chances, and most of them failed.

On VHS and dvd, that is.

So what's the difference between the media?

The EXPERIENCE. The movie-viewing experience is VASTLY different in the theater than at home on TV.

In the theater the image is some 20 feet high and however many feet long, and the lights are out -- so ALL you can see is the movie.

At home, these white or off-white walls reflect all the light, either sunlight coming in from the windows or lamp light bouncing around, to really emphasize how small your TV screen is. You are INTENSELY aware -- subconsciously, if nothing else -- of the fact that you're watching TV.

You're just watching a movie on TV. Nothing special. No big deal. It's just TV.

If someone wants to talk to you, you are socially responsible for listening to them. After all, it's not like you're in a movie theater or anything.

Ya gotta go to the bathroom? PAUSE, "Be right back." There's no urgency, no "Do I have time? What's gonna happen next? Should I hold it? They might be kissing for a while, but what if that thing's still behind the door? I could miss it!"

Unless you are seeing the movie for the first or second time, watching it on TV is not in any way an EVENT. You're just killin' time.

I'm saying that it's psychological. Subconscious. It's the size of the screen, the fact that you can see EVEREYTHING around the screen, and the subconscious attitutudes and habbits we have programmed into us about watching a movie on TV. We tend not to be IMMERSED IN movies on TV.

Okay. So why was my viewing last night so intense and enjoyable?

I was watching on a PORTABLE DVD PLAYER. We're not talking about an IMAX screen here. In fact, the screen on my dvd player is approximately a quarter of the size of the screen on my computer monitor.

The picture's CRISP... but COMPACTED. In fact, if you've ever sized-down a jpeg image, and you noticed those little artifacts (that kid of pixelation sort of ) that occur when you make an image TOO small... That occurs to video sometimes on my dvd player.

I mean, I can see everything clearly and sharply. In fact, I caught a few in-jokes when the bus gets slammed into the video store. There are posters for the following movies in the store: Arnold Schwartzenegger in WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S KING LEAR, Robin Williams as the Giant in JACK AND THE BEANSTALK, and Tom Hanks in TSUENOMI SUNRISE! (I had to zoom-in to be able to read Tom Hanks's name, though.)

Still, it's not what I'm looking at that makes the movie as exciting as it was on the Big Screen.

I believe -- and that's why I bothered to sit down and write this little tome -- that it's WHAT I'M HEARING that makes it work.

I've known for a LONG time about the power of audio. Been a fan since I was on a family trip around age 12 or 13, and I escaped the boredom of listening to adults catch up with adult stuff by popping a cassette of THE LONE RANGER radio show into my walkman and disappearing into the Wild West! Then, when I fell in love with the Tom Hanks/Dan Akroyd movie DRAGNET and I discovered that before it was a cheesy, too-serious-for-its-own-good TV show it was a cheesy, too-serious-for-its-own-good radio show, I ran down to the Ector County Public Library and checked out all the tapes they had of the show. Even then, I had already been listening to the vinyl album of Orson Welles's infamous radio broadcast of THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, the research about which had gotten me into THE SHADOW. Plus, stumbling across a cassette -- around Halloween time, I think -- of an episode of THE INNER SANCTUM introduced me to the sheer joy that is audio-horror!

So I've long frequented the Theatre of the Mind, and have long known that the imagination could conjure far more gruesome, exciting, or straight-up beautiful images than any combination of director, cinematographer, art director and special effects wizard.

Still, that's not what I'm talking about here. LOST WORLD already HAD images. I was watching them. (Plus, Spielberg's a brilliant filmmaker, he tells the story visually; if I hadn't been looking at the pictures I wouldn't have know what was going on.)

I'm talking about SOUND DESIGN.

Since the late '80s (at least since the time that Lucas created the THX sound system) cinema sound designers have been hiring and/or training aural GENIUSES! Their techniques are so subtle and so sophisticated that if there is something going on off-screen that doesn't exist exept in sound (say there's a fire that we saw the shot before, and now we're getting the reactions of the characters that are watching this building burn; we see the faces, but we hear the fire) the sound will shift between the cuts so that it's on the proper side of the character! And in such a scene, the off-camera sound is the ONLY thing keeping that fire alive in our imaginations! That's TOTALLY the work of the sound designers!

And that's a subtle thing, but it's not even as subtle as these guys get! I was watching the scene where Malcom is visiting Hammond at his (Hammond's) estate, and I had to pause the movie a couple of times and remove the headphones just to be sure this tiny little tinkling sound was actually coming from the movie. Hammond, apparently, was listening to this classical piano piece. But the sound mix had it almost completely removed from the soundtrack. It was this tiny little subliminal key to Hammond's character that revealed that while he was at home he always had this sublime music filling the large space of the home. Here in his room, it was almost inaudible. But in the reality of the world of the movie, almost inaudible or not, this sound would be there -- even if just barely.

The reality of filmmaking means that this room was most likely a sound stage, in no way attatched to the vast hallway we had just seen in the scene before. But the sound designers are all about helping CREATE the reality of the movie!

The night before that I wound-down watching the first X-MEN movie, and was more emotionally engaged in it thatn I had expected to be!

Don't get me wrong: Bryan Singer is a GREAT director and X-MEN is a straight-up great movie! I ALWAYS enjoy watching that movie!!!

But I did enjoy watching it on my tiny little dvd player much more than I expected.

And I believe it's about the sound.

I think that even without the spacial effect of having the 5-point surroundsound setup, the headphones immerses you in the world, which in turn brings you emotionally into the world of the movie.

I know that's the case with some of the great audio I've heard!

I'm not talking about X MINUS ONE or LIGHTS OUT. Those were recorded in mono. Those merely illustrate the power of listening with your imagination.

But I am talking about the HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY radio series (particularly the Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential Phases!) and the CHRONICLES OF NARNIA RADIO THEATRE and the STAR WARS RADIO DRAMAS!!!

SERIOSULY! Slide some headphones on and listen to a single episode of ANY of those series!!! It is a SINGULAR delight!

Why am I going on about this?

I guess I'm just still amazed that something that gets so little notice can be SO impacting!

Plus, who knows? Maybe someone will read this an look at audio dramas or theatrical cinema in a new way.

Mainly, though, I guess I just woke up obsessed with the notion, and had to get it out of me...