Saskia van Roomen has been running a film club supported by the London Film School, on a Saturday morning. Here’s two films of Exercise 2 – in which sound is used to decentre the action, and the audience’s attention. Filmmaker Eve writes:
today we had to film a scene with action ‘de-centred’ sound ‘centred’. We wanted to have a long shot with no cuts so we had to find a good location that was large enough to easily have two things going on at once. We decided to make it slightly funny and ridiculous by having a conversation happening about something unimportant with another person below trying to help someone seriously injured. The complete opposites worked well and we made sure we had a microphone right by the conversation so we could layer it over the audio so you weren’t actually able to hear what was happening with the injured person. The audience would be listening and watching the conversation at first making it ‘centred’ and then when the silent but dramatic action came in the conversation would become ‘de-centered’ and the action would become the main focus. It was a very fun exercise and it was interesting to play around with the audio in the edit.
We also liked this take on Exercise 1, adding voice to a montage of close-ups of a photograph
Cinema cent ans de jeunesse - BFI edit 