Gilly; Surreal Surround sound and black voids
for this years FMPs, the director wanted to use surround sound for its dark void. For context the main character gilly, hears the spirit of a young child that she is trying to save from the clutches of this demon that has kidnapped her. Even though this task was given to our sound operator using their own methods, i was tasked with finding a way to create surround sound digitally other than the physical way that was planned by the sound designer. The reason for us to both work on this effect it to find the most streamline and effective way to create the effect with the least time.
My method was pretty basic yet still got the feeling of surround sound and the idea of voices circling someone when using the appropriate headphones. for my test i sampled audio from the 1963 sci-fi horror Matango. in which people start turning into mindless half man half mushroom people, which can only insanley laugh. The audio files left and right audio tracks were altered, by having the the left track quieter than its right track, gradually getting louder,then as it peaked the right track would then take over by getting louder but then quieting down, creating the illusion of something passing by.
my basic test would need some extra work, which was then when i discovered a video tutorial of assigning audio tracks to specific parts of a room. for example i could have one track play as if it was behind someone whilst another track could also play at the right of someone.
In my research into this i was also tasked into looking into creating the dark void for the project. In the film, gilly is stuck in this unknown place that is nothing but darkness and black. Similar to that of the netflix series stranger things, i had looked into how they had created the void for themselves as well as how to do it in the budget we have; the results were quite intersting.
The stranger things version of the void was created souley with practical effects and colour grading, by having a black material on the floor covered with a thin layer of water to create the reflective aspect of the floor with the surrounding area to be covered in black curtains. luckily we do have acsess to a large room that is also equipeed with black curtains, However the main issue was the floor as we didnt have a way of creating a reflective floor with water. Thankfully i had reached out to a previous student who created a project with a similar effect, in which a young girl is trapped in a dark void place but was also accompanied by a large screen of tv static. The student had told me their method of creating the effect was to use Pvc plastic sheets placed over cut up bin bags to not only have their blackend floor, but with the reflective floor they were aiming for.
After bringing it up with the crew they ultimatley denied the use of the plastic as the quanity production design had were not in a good enough condition to use, so the alternative was to use clear plastc sheets to try. However the effect did not seem to go off well in my opinion as the white sheet was not as clear as something like the pvc plastic sheets would do. Finally i decided to look into creating the reflective floor through effects, but even so the effect ultimatley failed as it did not look like a natural reflection, but a image duplucated and mirrored on the floor, ultimatley killing the use of a reflective floor.
Even though the reflective floor would be scrapped, the void itself worked well, by a combination of light placement and camera angles, we did sucsessfully create the blackned space for our project