Paris metro sax, or: the difficulty of sound

while watching an online lecture on film and sound, i was reminded of my own experiments with video, and how difficult the sound dimension was sometimes when filming, in addition to the whole task of figuring out how to hold the camera still / or to find a good move to capture the scene. and going through the list of uploaded videos, i remembered this short clip that is all about sound, from my short trip to Paris in 2011.

and as counterpart, here's another mini-clip that is all about sound - yet here, the sound is a natural mountain stream:



things i didn't know about sound and film
the film online lectures starts with the silent black&white films of 1928 and then moves from there to sound and color. it's fascinating to get this glimpse behind the scenes of a medium that now is so all-encompassing. what’s especially fascinating is how the technical possibilties changed, and how this influenced film – in the time when there was no sound, film directors developed a way to film stories with speaking a lot in images. and they were very free in how to cut, how to show things, and needed to be experimental and innovative.

and then came sound, and you would think this would make things easier, but first it was harder: to film with sound, you needed to have the sound right there while filming, to tape it simultaneously to have it synchron. so if you had dialogue, you couldn’t cut the scenes. it had to be one take. and the cameras and camearmen needed to be in sound proof boxes (“ice boxes”) as otherwise you would hear the whizzing sound of the camera later. so it was like one step forward to add a dimension, and 2 steps back with restrictions that come with it. (here’s an image of that: film "ice box")

links... 
if you are interested, here's more about the film and black/white theme in this blog: Berlin / Hollywood, here's the course link: The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color, and here are more of my video moments (mostly from January)