Writing, Arts & Entertainment
Sound Design
Lesson time 11:19 min
To truly immerse an audience in your film, sound design is key. Ken teaches you how to spot for sound and harness the vast array of aural tools at your disposal.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: Spot for Sound With Story as Your Guide • Use Sound to Immerse Your Audience in the Moment • Seeing Through Sound • Go the Extra Mile
Preview
I don't in any way want to take away from the power of the image. There is nothing more powerful. We say the cliche, a picture is worth a thousand words, and indeed, it is. But you cannot also deny how important these oral components are, the words spoken, the songs sung, the music played, the effects in all of their glory. Whatever it is, this can be hugely important, and the most dynamic elements at times. And all you have to do to prove what I am saying is take just a run of the mill horror film, the teenage girls in her pajamas. She's leaving her bedroom. We know something bad is happening, and she's heading to the bathroom down the hall. So turn off the volume, and it's nothing. Put back the volume, and, you know, whether it's, you know, Bernard Herrmann in "Psycho" in the shower scene, that is a huge part of the dynamic of what's going on. You can see in the opening of the "Vietnam" film, there's a moment when we add the most horrible banshee scream to some footage of the confusion of soldiers in that first PTSD where they're rolling over, and there's two or three cuts, and a guy just goes like this. We don't know what it was, but we added this distant horrific banshee scream. And if-- if that didn't in some ways get your attention, then I don't know what will. [HELICOPTER WHIRRING] [MUSIC PLAYING] You want to use everything at your disposal to ask people to let go of the compelling narrative that is their life and to submit to the narrative that we think will add to their life. And among the many tools in the toolbox to do that is to have sound so realistic that it can be startling, where fighter planes pass by and through. And the modern sound and technology has permitted us to do so many wonderful things. And I was always sort of disappointed in the soundtrack of so many documentaries that seem to have, you know, two different sounds. One was troops tramping, and the other was cannons firing, and that was it. We sort of felt that if we were going to try to will these old photographs alive, we had to get into very, very complex sound effects, and we have done this with increasing, I think, complexity as we have moved along so that in the Civil War, in the middle of Gettysburg, I think we had 26 tracks going at once. Now, I think the maximum number of tracks in the Vietnam film was 160 in the middle of the Tet Offensive. Most of the footage we receive is MOS without sound, and we have to build it from scratch, and so we do that. And it is a huge important part of what we do, and we spend a long time sound spotting. That is, to say we end it with three or four effects tracks by the time we get to rough cut. And then maybe by the time we lock, we may have a few more tracks than that. But then we open it up to many, and we spend a lot of time thinking about when it should be that 150 tracks going and when it should be nothing. And what yo...
About the Instructor
Since its 2017 debut, Ken Burns’s The Vietnam War has enthralled over 39 million viewers by painting an intimate and revealing portrait of history. In this online film class, learn how Ken captivates audiences with his ability to distill vast research and complex truths into compelling narratives. From first treatment to final edit, Ken teaches his documentary filmmaking techniques that “wake the dead” to bring their stories to life.
Featured MasterClass Instructor
Ken Burns
The 5-time Emmy Award winner teaches how he navigates research and uses audio and visual storytelling methods to bring history to life.
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