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On Sound Design

MARK (M) I would love to know more about your approach to sound design. When do you begin thinking about sound - do you roughly think about it as you’re working on the visuals, or do you think about sound design after seeing the final images and piecing them together in post-production?

SHERI (S) I love sound and working with sound. The process for every piece is a little different. Very often I will have a sound, or a piece of music in my head from the very start, but that will very rarely become incorporated into the final piece – it’s just a starting point. At some point, the image editing usually takes over to really shape the piece and then I edit the sound to work with the structure that I have set up with the images. So as much as I love sound, images usually guide the process. 

That said, the more I study music and sound, the better filmmaker I become. Seán Street encapsulates a sound experience I hold dear in this quote - ‘If I listen long enough to the presence held in the space between things, be those things walls or horizons, if I concentrate and focus, I may hear something’ (The Sound of a Room: Memory and the Auditory Presence of Place, p 53). Sound has a physical presence, a lingering presence in spaces that is perpetually fascinating to me - capturing that quality within my sound design is an ongoing goal.

M How do you blend realistic and stylistic sounds to facilitate the mood of your films?

S It’s a very intuitive process. I am usually trying to draw out what I find meaningful in the images and the sound by playing off the more representational from the abstract within each element. Especially because the imagery is so abstract and the work is non-narrative, I want to give the audience some things to grab onto, focus points. 

On Process & Discovery

M In making and finishing the film, what did you discover and learn that you might adopt or further explore in future projects?

S I really started to think of the film frame as a container with Abound Box, and how the film could not be contained in the confined space of the frame. The more I thought about it, the more it made me want to make a work that pushed out of the frame altogether but is still a single-channel video. This occurred to me when I started working with the over-scanned files. When a roll of Super8 came back from the lab completely black, with scratches from whatever went wrong in the camera between the sprocket holes, it was a great gift. It was the abundance of Abound Box that directly led to the next film in which the ‘image’ is outside of the frame altogether.

Mark’s Final Thoughts

• I thought it was interesting to see Sheri mention the idea of using sound to give the audience certain focus points throughout the film. I could be wrong but I assume that she also gives focus points through very specific images - in the first minute or so, a few silhouette figures seemingly move across the frame which immediately influence the way you perceive movement and shape. Along with the sounds of whispers, I think these silhouettes help create certain associations and thoughts about the film’s underlying themes.

• I was really fascinated by Sean Street’s quote because I feel like it alludes to the spiritual qualities of sound. And I think Sheri partly describing sound as having a ‘lingering’ presence leaves room for its mystical element.

  Tags Analog Colour Experimental

The founder of Hommage, Mark Shaba published this interview on 03.02.2022. Mark is a filmmaker from Victoria, Australia. He respectfully acknowledges the past and present traditional owners of the land on which he creates, promotes and screens art, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation who are the custodians.