Dialogue, monologue, and voice-over narration progresses the story of the movie. What would a movie be without dialogue? Even 90 to years ago, there were silent movies with no audio dialogue, but dialogue cards were used, and background music set the tone of the scene. Take a look at the following example of a scene with and without dialogue. Jack, Suzie and Alec are walking home after work. Jack begins the conversation, as he always does. Suzie speaks, as she is always the first one to respond.
Alec is silent for a moment and the other two stop walking. Alec notices that they stopped so he stops walking too. Bewildered, Alec mumbles. Jack retorts. Alec looks at them both. Suzie interjects. Alec returns a comment. After a brief moment of silence where all three look at one another, they shrug their shoulders and begin to walk again. Suzie questions. Alec comments again. There is silence again and Suzie stops the other two.
Suzie speaks. Jack interjects again. Alec calmly states. Jack and Suzie look at each other stunned. The above scene, with no dialogue but just a description, is only a group of actions with no meaning. They could refer to almost any type of situation. As a viewer, after watching the above scene, would you be interested enough in watching the rest of the movie with no dialogue?
Alec is silent for a moment as the other two stop walking. Alec notices that they stopped walking so he stops. After a brief moment of silence, where all three look at one another, they shrug their shoulders and begin to walk again.
The dialogue gives the viewer an understanding of what is going on in the movie. If the above scene was at a beginning of a movie, the viewer would have an idea what the conflict of the movie was going to be.
A contemporary viewer would be lost without dialogue. On April 25th—two months later than originally planned due to COVID 19—film lovers will be glued to their seats to find out which of the nominees won the Oscars in the 93rd Academy Awards.
The date is getting closer, the bets are on, and cinephiles are rushing to their favorite streaming platform to catch up with their viewing and prepare for the big night. But can you imagine a great movie without great sound?
As George Lucas once said , sound is half of the moviegoing experience. Filmmakers have always understood how sound and music adds to the story they are telling. From this year, there are three instead of the previous four awards to celebrate great sound in movies: Best Original Score, Best Original Song, and Best Sound, which consolidates the previous Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing categories, reducing the total numbers of categories to The first Academy Awards ceremony took place in May with only 13 categories, none of them for a musical category.
This changed in , when Music Scoring and Song were added to the awards honoring films released from the previous year. When the Special Effects category was divided into Sound Effects and Special Visual Effects in , another award honoring sound in movies was added to the list. Sound, especially dialogue, makes it easier to understand what is happening. But it also provides texture and emotion to each scene. Most movies would not be interesting at all if you took away the sound. And when we go to the theaters, we expect the sound to be as exciting and encompassing as the images on the screen.
In this edition of HowStuffWorks , you will learn how analog and digital sound systems work. You will also learn about the three major digital systems:. Sound in movies has come a long way. As early as , Thomas Edison and his associates were experimenting with synchronizing sound to moving pictures.
In , Warner Brothers released " Don Juan ," the first commercial film to have accompanying recorded sound. The next year, Warner Brothers released " The Jazz Singer " with music, sound effects and a few lines of dialogue.
Sound had finally arrived in the movies. The mechanism for delivering sound in the early days of cinema was incredibly simple. Vitaphone , used in "The Jazz Singer," consisted of a record player playing a wax record. This was known as sound-on-disc. The sound recording was usually done after the movie was filmed.
The record was played on a turntable that synchronized sound to the film by controlling the speed of the projector. It was a simple but very effective way to add audio to a movie. In the early s, sound-on-film began to supplant sound-on-disc as the technology of choice for adding a soundtrack to a movie.
An interesting thing about sound-on-film is that the sound is several frames away from the corresponding images. This is because the audio pickup , or reader , is set either above or below the lens assembly of the projector. Most analog pickups are in the basement below the lens , while digital pickups are normally in the penthouse fastened to the top of the projector.
A test film is run to calibrate the sound to the picture. Once this calibration is done, projectionists can splice film together knowing that the sound will synchronize properly. The most common method is an optical process whereby a transparent line is recorded along one side of the film. This strip varies in width according to the frequency of the sound. For this reason, it is known as a variable-area soundtrack.
As the film passes the audio pickup , an exciter lamp provides a bright source of light , focused by a lens through the transparent line. The light that passes through the film shines on a photocell. The light is changed to electrical current by the photocell.
The amount of current is determined by the amount of light received by the photocell. The wider parts of the strip allow more light, which causes the photocell to produce more current. Since the width of the transparent strip changes the amount of light, this results in a variable electric current that can be sent to a pre-amplifier.
The pre-amplifier boosts the signal and sends it to the amplifier , which distributes the signal to the speakers. A variation of this method is known as variable-density soundtrack.
It uses a strip that varies in transparency instead of width. The more transparent the strip is, the more light shines through. The audio leveling in Movie Maker works just like the front-to-rear fade in a car. You either have a state of balance the middle of the fader , where the audio is equally distributed between front and rear, or you have the audio skewed one direction or the other.
For greater control over individual sections of audio , leave Audio Levels set to the middle. Balance between audio from video clips and soundtrack is maintained, allowing you to adjust the volume of individual clips more easily. Fading audio in introduces viewers to an audio selection more gradually. Fading audio out makes scene changes less abrupt. Windows Movie Maker creates fades about two-thirds of a second in length. When you adjust the volume of an audio clip in Movie Maker, it reduces the volume of the entire clip.
Windows Movie Maker allows you to mute selected audio clips. Muting a clip makes it easy to replace it with something else. If only a small portion of an audio clip needs muting , divide the clip into smaller clips to isolate the problem audio, and then mute only the small section instead of having to mute the full clip. AU tracks are selected by default.
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