▌Shooting stage: actual sound or dubbing?

Actual sound and post-dubbing are two processes in film sound design. It does not mean that post-dubbing is needed because the technical specifications of actual sound cannot be guaranteed, nor does it mean that post-dubbing is never as good as live sound. It should be judged and decided by sound designers and directors based on many factors.

For example, I produced a film called Paths of the Soul, which tells the story of a Tibetan family worshiping the mountains. The filming lasted for 365 days with many amateur actors, including the passers-by they met during the journey who were also filmed. A film like this does not have any possibilities for post-dubbing. As for comedies, the performances are very random, and the actors' sense of presence and rhythm are hard to be replicated. There are also some films such as Snipers shot in extremely cold environment. The most realistic physiological and mental states presented on the site are also difficult to be simulated in a studio.

In addition, there is another situation where we need to consider whether actual sound is suitable for the style shaping of the film. For instance, the story of Karen Mok and Xu Zheng hypnotizing each other in the film The Great Hypnotist. There was no problem with the clarity of the actual sound, but the spatial texture of the scene couldn’t be eliminated technically, which greatly restricted my application of it. I hoped to adopt the dubbing since I wanted to create a unique scene in this film. A unique sound style that turned all language, motion effects, environment, and psychological auxiliary sound effects into one element, so that different elements could be interwoven in the sense of hearing, thus creating a psychedelic sense to echo the theme. 

▌Post-production: Film always has regrets

What matters most in post-production is time, whether it’s for sound edition, directing or all departments involved. 

Film always has regrets, and most of which have to do with the time. One characteristic of today's films is that the release schedule is often determined before shooting starts, which means that the post-production can be predicted. My suggestion is that we must make the plan in a reasonable manner. Many tasks can be prepared in advance or even put forward after being refined. We should try to avoid wasting time on repeated labor, rework and blind experiments.

▌The value of sound: immersion and empathy 

The greatest value sound presents to films is to convey more real feelings to the audience, whether it is creating the atmosphere of the film or highlighting the emotions of the characters. Compared with the pictures, the sound is more three-dimensional and immersive. 

Take the attack at the beginning of Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms as an example. There are two very important sound elements in this scene, the throwing of catapults and the salvo of thousands of arrows from the top of the gate. What the director wants to express is that young soldiers only feel the true cruelty after arriving on the battlefield, which creates a strong sense of psychological oppression and fear in their minds. Therefore, it’s necessary for the sound to create a realistic and terrifying destructive effect. We simulated the auditory effect of piercing the sky and the eardrums, and pushed the sound of thousands of arrows to the extreme. During trial screening, audiences in the IMAX cinema strongly responded to the scene, and some even felt physical discomfort. The particularly personal feedback allows the audience to directly empathize with the pain of these children when they face the battlefield at that moment, and immerse themselves in the cruelty of war. 

Finally, Zhao Nan summarized four steps to create the sound style of your own and encouraged everyone to establish a sound aesthetic.

▌Create the sound style of your own 

How to find a temperament for a film and create the sound style of your own? Perhaps I may advise four points for you: Firstly, you should understand whether the core of the film is an event or a character. If it is an event, is the narrative rhythm fast or slow? Secondly, you should clarify the type of film. Thirdly, it is the image style, cyberpunk or black and white? Sunny or gloomy? Fourthly, as for the director’s core expression, I think the expression must have feedbacks and you need to anticipate how the audience feel when they leave. 

For example, Full River Red can be completely transformed into a realist style -- language, footsteps, and fighting sounds can be created into a real lane space mixed with night insects, birdsong, and wind blows, to present a natural and realistic temperament; however, Full River Red is also featured as a suspense film. To achieve this, I blocked out all natural sounds and only retained the wind. But it is a specially processed sound effect instead of the sound of real wind. I placed them in unexpected positions according to different tones to form the current suspenseful temperament in coordination with the music, so that the style of the entire film became completely different. 

▌The aesthetics of sound

The aesthetics of sound are relatively consistent with culture. For example, Full River Red is a story about the Southern Song Dynasty, which is mainly featured with cultural simplicity, so we decided on a minimalist sound positioning.

The film Shadow is full of the image style of ink painting and the black and white tone. What does ink painting feel like? Simple lines without too many modifications, and it presents a kind of fluidity. So how can we use sound to display such a kind of feature? For example: we can adopt the method of dots, lines, and surfaces to outline the composition of the sound in a clearer manner, and always maintain the interaction between sparseness and density, stillness and movement, realism, and freehand brushwork in terms of the sense of hearing. 

I like the snow scene at the beginning of Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms very much. The first written record of snow in oracle bone inscriptions appeared in the late Shang Dynasty, so we hoped to design the snow at the beginning as the first snow in China to convey a sense of primitiveness and roughness. Meanwhile, when we created the mythical beasts such as Taotie (ancient Chinese mythological creature), Lei Zhenzi (a character in the classic Chinese novel) and the Dragon Bearded Tiger, I specifically consulted Classic of Mountains and Seas and Investiture of the Gods. The books described Lei Zhenzi as a man "having a pair of wind and thunder wings under his ribs", and Taotie as a beast “whose sound is just like the crying of a baby". We hoped to create an oriental mythical beast and establish our own oriental aesthetics with these cultural characteristics as much as possible.

▌Q & A：

Young director Xia Meng: Hello, Ms. Zhao Nan, I’d like to ask you a question about my film this time. In this situation where there are no lines at all and we just want to emphasize the subjective and objective voices, how can we make the audience understand and make the difference between them? Because my film is about a deaf and I especially hope that the audience can share his subjective feelings and compare his subjective feelings with the hearing experience of the healthy people.

Audience: Will you tell the director what kind of sound effect you want to create, and what kind of sound effect do you want to be presented in the camera?

Zhao Nan: I, perhaps, will not ask the director to shoot anything for the sake of sound effect, because the film needs a unified image style. But the director needs to tell me what should be expressed for each scene. After reading the script, I will also discuss with the director and give some suggestions with pictures, such as: "If your picture looks like this, I will deal with it in this way. If your picture looks like that, I will switch into another plan".

Audience: Hello, Ms. Zhao, as you have just mentioned, how can we deal with sound effect that may not exist in real life in the context of realism, so that they can still convey a realistic natural environment in the film?

Zhao Nan: To present realistic stories with a different feeling, you can make use of addition and subtraction to change the real sound components and proportions. For example, if you want to convey the feeling of anxiety in the venue, we can choose a sound relevant to the buildings and people here to represent the irritability; however, if you want to add the sound of "waterfall" in the venue which has nothing to do with the site, or if you want a certain sound element which can run through the whole film, I think it necessary to make some preparations with reasons, such as setting up a scene to introduce this element first, and then blend it into the subjective or objective scene through sound mixing to match the characters and emotions.