Thursday, June 04, 2009

Kinetics and Sound


The importance of “kinetics” for a director
In directing a film, a director needs to know about kinetics, because the kinetics or the movement of the actor in the screen can be a good medium of communication to reinforce the meaning of the action. In realism film genre, the movement of the actors should be as realistic as the movement in real life. In another genre such as musical genre, the movement can be more melodramatic, bombastic and hyperbolic.

Giannetti (1996, 92) discusses that the frame in film can define the movement and also can create a three dimensional effect that is important to illustrate the situation or emotion in the film. Using some particular movement can bring the emotion of the audiences. For example: the movement toward the camera of a protagonist can make the audience feel close relation with the protagonist and vice versa. The other movements to create the mood of the film are upward and downward movements, right to left and left to right movement. The movement can be supported by the choosing of camera distance and angle. For example, a high and wide angle can create the loneliness effect to the action more than using an eye level and wide angle.

Sound
According to Mollison (1997, 338), equalisation the process of affecting the quality of sound coming through the mixer by selectively emphasising or diminishing the relative strength of difference parts of sound. The equalisation process uses the control of treble-affecting the high frequencies in the sound-, the mid-range –adjusting the mid frequencies of the sound- and the bass – arranging the low frequencies of the sound. For example, to keep the consistent quality of the sound in filming one person in different shots, the audio recordist needs to arrange the position of the treble, mid and bass knobs to the same position in every take.

Normalising the sound mixer means to put all of the input knob into zero positions, especially when the mixer had used by different person before. The reason of doing normalising is to hear the real sound produced in the filming without any influence from the electronic circuitry. Then from this step, the sound engineer can adjust the sound according the necessity.

Discussing about mic level and line level, Mollison (1997, 337) states that a mic level signal is the audio signal level which is available from many microphones. It is a low-level voltage signal (usually from 2-5 millivolts). A line level signal is a higher voltage signal (up near one volt or higher) sent from another piece of equipment such as a VCR, a tape recorder or a CD player. An error of positioning the mic/line selector can cause a distort sound. For instance, if the mic level signal is assigned as a line level source, the volume will be very low and vice versa.

No comments: