Class2

I went to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie for the second time the other night. This time I paid much more attention to the soundtrack and I noticed some things I hadn’t picked up on the first time around. All the talk about motif music we did in our last class helped me to notice the motif music in Sherlock Holmes. Throughout the movie there are certain bits of theme music that link together the mysteries of the film. These motifs give the audience hints about how Holmes is going to solve the problems at hand. Every time Holmes finds a new piece of the puzzle, the theme music plays. It is similar to the motifs used in The Manchurian Candidate which link pieces of a different mystery together.
There are also different motifs for each character. The main villain has a theme that plays every time he appears on screen, but also to suggest to the audience his connection with a certain crime.
Holmes and Watson also have a theme song that plays whenever they are about to launch into a mystery. Their theme music however touches the audience on a much more emotional level. The Holmes and Watson song is played to excite the audience, and in anticipation of the action packed adventure to come.

Class1

As a third year student of the Communication Studies department who has taken several film classes, I am familiar with the importance of the film soundtrack. In the Communication Studies program, students are asked to pick a specialization from the four following topics: video, film, sound, and intermedia. The specialization I chose was film.
Having the chance to create our own films also gave us the chance to discover the value of the soundtrack. Sounds, whether they are vocal, musical or special effects change what is happening on screen. For example, during a screening last year in one of my film classes, the professor showed us a film clip made by students in which the characters are walking down the hallway of a old, dirty, and quite creepy building. The professor went on to explain how this hallway was in fact perfectly clean and quite new; it was the sound effects that made it seem dirty and old. We watched the clip again and I listened more closely this time. I noticed the sounds of creaking floorboards, squeaking rodents, flies buzzing, and water dripping. It was these sounds that had made the hallway seem dirty, old, and creepy when it was in fact new and clean. However I only noticed this after it had been pointed out to me by the professor.
My goal over the next few weeks is to further develop my knowledge of how the soundtrack affects a film. I hope that by the end of this class my ear will be finely tuned to the power of the movie soundtrack.