Sound for film research number 2

To begin with, I chose the intro for The Texas chainsaw massacre (1974) as it's a horror/thriller movie, it has plenty of gore elements and the movie is quite realistic as its based on a real event. The intro began with a text, introducing the movie, shown on a black background. There was no sound except for the narrator reading the text in the intro which can be due to the small budget of the movie or maybe they wanted to keep the intro simple as lack of music could build up the tension which it in does as the person watching focuses a lot more on what is being read by the narrator. The focus builds up and we can hear the sound of someone breathing as well as other noises which aren't too defined, then the build up reveals quick flashes of gory close up's of a corpse. This then builds up to another reveal of a corpse but no we can see the corpses head and the image remains while we can hear a news report about corpses being found by the police. The camera then zooms out from the corpse to reveal another corpse beneath it. The screen then changes to the title of the movie on a red transparent background while we can hear sound effects in the back ground which is most probably due to the lack of visual action. These sound effects keeps the audience hooked in as the cast/credits show up. The amount of sound effects then increase drowning out the news report and the intro stops.

This intro overall was quite well executed whereas I do think that at the beginning there could have been some quiet music in the background as then the primary focus would still be the narrator but the intro would not be that boring. The build up then was quite effective along with the reveal setting a intense atmosphere for the movie. The sound effects worked well drowning out the news report at the end as that hooked in the audience due to the that they most likely weren't expecting that when the sound effects first came in.

The second movie clip that I watched was Dawn of the dead (1978) mall scene. I have chosen this scene as the characters are flying a helicopter which is similar to World War Z where the main characters are flying a plane to Jerusalem. Another reason why I have chosen this scene is because it includes zombies and the whole movie is about zombies, just like World War Z. Here in this scene we could hear the helicopter flying, we could also hear the characters speaking while we couldn't see them. Lastly we could also hear a pulsing soundtrack where a pitch shifter was used to make these high frequency noises which were like small stabs in the composition. Once the Helicopter has landed and the characters made their way out from the helicopter we could still hear the continuous soundtrack as well as the characters speaking. The soundtrack then began to evolve a little more. We also could at one point hear music coming from the mall when the characters looked in there. This then carried on until the end of the scene.

In conclusion this scene was done quite well whereas I have to say that there was area for improvement such as adding hyper real sound effects when they were walking or grabbing their guns. They could have also added more zombie noises in the background in order to make the scene more interesting. Whereas on the other hand I have to admit that the soundtrack gave the scene some ambience which worked quite well.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJGhCgC91aM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Gein

http://www.the13thfloor.tv/2016/07/06/the-real-story-behind-the-texas-chainsaw-massacre-the-notorious-killer-ed-gein/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zK_44APmbY

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077402/