Reflections On Sound Design

Here is the link to a scene from the movie "The Dead Zone":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLhFIwkbtJI

I do not have a .pdf Creator or Distiller program, so I could not turn the script translation into one.  Instead, I am just copying and pasting what I wrote.  I hope this suffices.


FADE IN

INT. MAN'S HOUSE - DAY

CHRISTOPHER WALKEN is standing in a MAN's living room. A sidetable is to his right with a vase sitting on it. CHRISTOPHER WALKEN takes his cane and bats it at the vase. The vase SHATTERS into many pieces. Reacting to this, the MAN and his SON look up to CHRISTOPHER WALKEN.

CHRISTOPHER WALKEN

(shouting)

The ice is gonna break!

FADE OUT


This scene is short and sweet, and is based solely around its sound.  I couldn't find a clip on YouTube that was a little bit longer than this, but everything that leads up to the vase smashing is conversation.  Walken destroys the vase to grab attention, and the film accomplishes that task very well in this scene.

The Gestalt principle is displayed perfectly in this scene.  The vase is in the picture when smashed, and it can be seen breaking and knocking over the sidetable, which establishes figure and ground.  Illusion is also employed because Walken may have broken that vase with a cane, but there is absolutely no chance that director David Cronenberg ordered him to stand a foot away from an actual glass vase and recklessly break it.  That would be dangerous.  Instead, the illusion is presented from a recording that sounded as if Walken smacked the object with his cane and it appeared realistically as if glass shattered into many pieces.

Concerning listening modes, this particular scene does a good job of demonstrating both casual and semantic sound.  The casual sound in question is very obvious.  At the end of this scene, Walken screams urgently at the man.  That sound is actual; he is recorded in yelling that line.  As mentioned in the above paragraph, the vase breaking could not possibly be actual and was recorded after this was filmed.  Glass shattering was recorded to be representational of what took place in the scene.