Visual Evidence Monologue

f view. In the real version however, as soon as the audio starts you are placed in a perspective, the first thing you hear is a conversation from street level so even though the long lens is fixed on Eric Bana you know the moment is taking place on the ground. Then to further drive the point home audience hears Daniel Craig singing. The vocal recording itself is close, intimate, even though camera, and by extension you, never go inside the car, that is more than enough to put you there. Then the car that you’re really supposed to pay attention to, the black one, parks and the sound of it parking jumps out and mechs. Just like the audience wouldn't hear Daniel Craig that way from where the camera and supposed recorder is, you wouldn't hear the

car that clearly, but the sound design picks these things out to tell a specific story. The point here is that in film you really do see with your ears more than anyone thinks, and sound doesn't mind that image gets the credit, because a key to the power of sound design is its invisibility. If dialogue sounds close then you are close to the person who’s speaking it, wherever they are in the world.
So back to the original sequence and yeah, not to forget that there is no music in the sequence. This four minute and fifty second part of the first hour of the movie is without music and almost entirely deprived of words. How does spielberg and legendary sound designer Ben Burt, who gave the world the heavy and toned sound of the lightsaber, how did they build the tension here in this scene? Well Burt does it by building a bed of constant noisy city ambience and then singling out and stringing together, similar to beads on a wire, key noises that tell the story. The scene that revolves around attempted assassination with a payphone that characters switched out. The string of isolated plot sounds goes like this: the car with the assassins arrives, the dialogue of the target’s wife and especially young daughter, then their car pulling away, signaling to move forward for the assassins, then the coins and rotary phone that will make the call, then the priming of the detonator, and then the trouble strikes. Audiences in the movie theaters upon viewing this scene for the first time most likely went “...Wait, what was that?”. The first moment of trouble comes in sound, up until this moment in the movie the isolated noises represented the steps of the plan going smoothly. A truck passing by and its subsequent noise, represents a break in that chain and a hitch in the plan. At this point the ambiance starts to take on some strange qualities. There is a high pitched whine like a train stopping on top of everything and everyone and just like the moving truck blocks the assassins view the movers talking between one another keeps them from hearing the daughter’s car pull back to the apartment. The daughter character plays a key part in the scene so Burt isolates her again, but not here voice this time, but rather her footsteps which continue in doors and on the stairway. In the apartment of the target, the ambiance is quiet and the really incredible thing about this scene is that Burt and Spielberg build the tension not by working to bring the audience and the apex of the music in a great summation of noise, but by gradually subtracting elements. Once the daughter is up here in the apartment, the danger can be singled by a single sound effect - dial of the phone.
The important elements have been set up so well by this point that you could most likely follow the rest of the scene without seeing it at all.

The phone rings due to the fact that the assassins didn't notice the daughter come back and due to the overwhelming interference of noise and it continues ringing until a character picks it up. But instead of the target the assassin who was dialing the phone hears a little girl’s voice and the whole world it seems goes array, the sound starts intertwining and winding up, whilst at the same time eliminating almost deafening sound that somewhat resembles ringing tinnitus patients experience in the absence of sound. The climax of this scene brilliantly is silence, but its a type of silence that works so well because it anticipates the noise, of the explosion to come, explosion not only in a straight up meaning, but also an explosion, a bust to the plans of the team of the assassins. All the while camera focuses on two of the attempted murderers who realise that the plan was compromised, one being the man who was calling and the other realising daughter’s car came back, try to run to the position of the primer and abort the plan. At the point where these two man reach their intended destination the ambience has become really impressionistic and when it comes back in it has echo and reverb. Its hurried footsteps in an anxious siren, the whole sound universe corresponds in a personal to the assassins to their feelings and their nerves so it makes sense that when the final question is asked its the sound design that answers the question “Are we on or

off?”
I'm not sure what people are doing in film school these days, but i truly hope that someone who has any interest in making movies at all they should at least attempt to make a scene like that.A nake and what might seem as empty vessel of a scene filled only with skilled camerawork and masterfull sound design. Once they finish it, they should watch the scene back, but close their eyes shut and ask themselves, what exactly do their ears see.