With Immort being a science fiction film the sound design of the film is an important aspect of it.
This turned out to be a difficult endeavour as in order to design the sound for the VFX parts of the film, which were the parts that really needed good sound design to help sell we had to see where they were and what they would be doing. However, for the most part we didn’t receive any renders of VFX until the 2nd May.
This meant that in order to complete the sound design work in time we needed to have our approach sorted and ideas and plans in mind beforehand.
Now, with Immort the key thing to realise was that it didn’t necessarily need massive sounds in the scale of something like Star Wars or Star Trek. The drones in this for example aren’t massive and are powered by fans, therefore the sound for them didn’t require some huge sound like you would perhaps expect to hear when talking about drones in a sci-fi film.
There is an instance in the cut we handed in of Immort where the fly by of a drone is missing due to it only being on an earlier version (rendering issues meant they didn’t put everything in the cut). This can be seen here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2MbOMliWJxaNWVmdGw4Qi16ak0
Another instance of a missing effect with some sound design done for it is the glitch in the food:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2MbOMliWJxaVWpsbEQzSVlUUFk
Another key aspect of sound design in the film was the HUD. One of the major points in the film is how annoying these are, with information being constantly shoved in your face 24/7. A major part of showing this would be through the sound design. The constant notifications and adverts that play on Sici’s HUD are designed so that by the time she turns them off in the film, you, the viewer are glad that they’ve stopped. The contrasting silence in the film after this (and also in the beginning) helping to show just how intrusive they were on her life. This leads on to the fact that you only ever hear her HUD making any noise. This is for two reasons. The first is simply that the film is from her perspective, therefore the point of how annoying these sounds are can be better made by only showing hers, otherwise the silence in the second half of the film would not be as present, therefore failing to get that point across as effectively. The other was for reasons of practicality. As it is Sici’s HUD has a lot of sound associated with it, especially in the form of the notifications. Now, when Paul, her brother enters the apartment, imagine if he also had all of this going on – it would be audio chaos, you wouldn’t know what to focus on, therefore the decision was made to only show her sounds. This also works in line with the way the technology in the film’s world works – the nanobots being inside you would be able to feed you sound information, but they would have no way of projecting that out into the world. This is why there was no attempt to make the HUD sounds sound as if they were coming out of tiny speakers as the sounds are in her head, therefore they is no reason why they would not be full bodied.
The appearance (and disappearance of the glass) glass, food and nano pill cup were interesting to do the sound design for, the challenge being to make them all similar enough to show that the same process was creating them all, but also slightly different to reflect the different objects that were being made. This is where on two of the three occurrences more natural sounds were used, albeit in a heavily processed manner, this was done to show that despite the things being created looking exactly like real world things, they aren’t and are in fact themselves heavily processed and not ‘real’. This was in part initially influenced by the anime Psycho-Pass in which things appear in a similar kind of manner.
The sound of the nanobot’s was odd as we never actually saw any visuals for them, we knew that they were going to be in the pills that Sici takes – and that there would be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of them, thus the sound of them is a chaotic high/mid noise which denotes the swarm of them lying within. This sound then translates to a few other instances in the film, such as when the nanobot pill cup appears you hear them more clearly than you do in the other appearance sounds. They also make a showing after Sici slaps Paul, albeit incredibly subtlety (this is down to the fact that it has been mentioned before that they would work to repair any damage to Paul after being hit, but the VFX at this point don’t denote anything of that sort happening. The other time they appear is perhaps the most interesting. When Sici turns them off you hear a cacophony of sounds, mainly of the HUD messing up, but also of the nanobots wheezing and dying.
The Hologram is an odd thing, the way we handled the sound for that was to make it seem like an automated thing, where they insert various phrases as and when needed into a stock hologram video, which then helps to give the corporation who are the ‘antagonists’ of the film a quality of being automated, digital and not natural.
One of the key influences in the sound design work is the following article talking about creating emotion trough sound design:
http://designingsound.org/2015/08/emotional-beings-a-creature-sound-design-discussion/
In this it talks about how by utilising real sounds it can help to elicit an emotional response from the audience. This is the case in this film with the very messed up sounds of the bits and bobs appearing. But, flipped on it’s head, the sound design work is designed, in part, to showcase how emotionally un-empathetic the world seems to be, with the constant notification being a good example of this. They aren’t designed to do anything other than showcase how annoying they are. Also, voices like the HUD adverts and the hologram have processing that is perhaps un-needed added to them, however slight that may be in the case of the adverts.
What was really interesting about the sound design on Immort was the process by which we had to do things. They were a very organised team, but ended up running into issues such as render times, which pushed back the dates by which they could give us rough versions of the final VFX products by several weeks. This was made worse by the fact that not everything was ready for the first cut we received of the VFX and we ended up getting two more, which meant I spent a significant amount of time waiting to receive cuts while not being able to do any work on the film, which meant that the work me and the team did on the sound design was compressed into around three days, of which half of the time at the minimum was spent waiting for new cuts. The plus side of this did at least allow me more time to help out on other films. The speed at which we had to work was good in some regards, with articles like this showing the speed at which professionals have to work in the industry:
Sounds for Superheroes: Behind the Supersonic Sound Design for The Flash
This article states how the turn around time for a 40 minute TV show is around a week, with episodes often having between 300-500 sections where detailed sound work needs doing beyond the regular instances of dialogue. This means that the sound team in post production has to work at an extremely quick speed. This is obviously helped by the show being a running TV series, so many sounds have to re-used from previous weeks to keep continuity.
It also demonstrates the way in which the sound designer for the series has to answer to various people above him in the chain of command.