You may create your own topic, please check with me to make sure I will greenlight it. I suggest you return to your DQs and develop one of them into a paper.
Here are some more topics.
1. You may do a Film Clip Analysis Exercise with your focus on sound.
2. Sound edit your own scene from a narrative film, picking a scene that has a fair amount of dialogue. You may take a scene from a sound film and turn off the sound and create your own soundtrack for it or turn it into a silent film by writing intertitles in place of the dialogue. You will not be composig the music for a scene in a sound film but you will have to select music that in your view goes well with it. As I also said in class, this involves a close sycncing of the music to the sound, not just putting a song or an album on and let it play while the film plays.
To get a better idea of the kind of scene and film I am talking about, take a look again at the clip from Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) I showed you in class. Notice how the crescendo builds as the waves crash on the rocks as Madeleine (Kim Novak) and Johnny (Jimmy Stewart) passionately kiss. As Dan Tran pointed out in class, no moving image automatically matches a sound, and no image of waves crashing automatically demands a cresendo. Ditto for the emotional moment when the two characters kiss. The way Bernard Hermann matches them is in some ways fairly conventional. The scene builds to the kiss. The kiss is in turn timed to happen as the rear projected footage of the waves crashes on the rocks twice. So a slow fuse building to the crashing waves crescendo kiss makes film soundtrack sense. You can also see that before Madeleine runs away after saying she is mad (the first really emotional moment in the scene with the first rise in volume), she has a conversation with Johnny. Each time she responds to Johnny, a different theme we've heard earlier in the film is played. The music is created for each scene, sometimes for a single shot, with the entire film in mind. The score is conventional in that it does not call attention to itself but guides the viewers to respond as fully as possible to the pleasurable fantasy projected out on screen in front of them. The soundtrack is unconventional because the music helps the viewer see that Johnny does not really know Madeleine but instead projects his own male fantasy on to her mostly expressionless female face. See, gender does matter sometimes! You can hear the themes from Vertigo played on a piano here.
(As I also said, there are two other kisses during the film also set to music. The third one, a 360 shot, includes a cross cut flashback to the second kiss with no dialogue and music throughout.) The composer, Bernard Herman, composes the music so that a musical theme from the film already matched to a character earlier in the film matches different. Many scenes have no music.
Here are three different options (pick one):
A. Watch a scene in a sound film with dialogue and with the sound turned off. Then watch it with closed captions on it, still no sound. Then watch it with the sound. Then watch it with sound and closed captions. Then decide on your music. Then fit the music to the scene. Now write 500 words explaining what you did why you did.
B. Watch a scene in a silent film with sound turned off. Watch it again and notice where the intertiles are inserted. Watch it again with two different sound tracks. Write 500 words explaining why the music from one soundtrack works better than the other.
c. Watch a scene in a sound film with dialogue and with the sound turned off. You are watching a silent film now. Write intertitles so the audience can understand the scene. As I said in class, the itnertitles are like subtitles. Some of the dialogue will have to be cut so that the titles do not interrupt the narrative very often. Now write a 500 word paper explaining what you did why you did.
3. Write an essay on a scene or shots from one of the films we have seen on the relation between the scene and the music. As we have seen, all three films are linear narratives that also make use of montage editing. Both films also reflect on human development as creative and as destructive. And the music in both films loops back or repeats earlier musical passages. Don't pick thes following examples since we discussed them in class, put find one like them: the rotating space capule falling near the end of Koyaanisqatsi and the increasingly sped up sequence at the end of Man with a Movie Camera. There are similar moments in Decasia. Now write a 500 word paper on it.
4. How do the films and the Szendy reading make use of analogies, juxtapositions that create differences or similarities, to invite (and gently pressure) viewers to pay close attention to their in order understand the films or the reading as a whole. Again, select a sequence like one we watched in class. And then write a 500 word paper on it.