Tuned Realities: How Sound Redefines Visual Narratives

WATCH AND MORE INFO HERE: https://youtu.be/vz4SBGwThcs
This short film was created as a focused project for a Vanderbilt Course on Sound Design in Cinema.

Despite both having separate histories of painfully difficult attempts at failed sound designs of student project films in the past, we decided to take on the ambitious task of taking the same scene and editing the sound in 3 entirely different ways. It was important to us to make no adjustments to the visual edits between each version of the scene, meaning they all share the same timeline of clips, and no adjustments could be made to color correction, stabilization, or other visual qualities that could alter the storytelling in some way, leaving it all to the sound.

With this idea in mind, it was important for us to write, plan, act, and shoot the film in a way that was versatile and up to interpretation. This meant strategic framing, limited dialogue, and an open-ended plot.

We found moments where a sound could make a certain visual stand out with a pivotal meaning in one version of the scene, while it blended in and seemed unimportant in the other versions. We thought a lot about changes in the point of audition over the course of the scene and between the three versions. We had a mix of diegetic/non-diegetic and practical/artificial sound layers in each film, allowing us to grow and expand each one in a different world.