Today, I completed the rest of my rescore of ‘Persona’. I started where I left off yesterday, which meant It was time to score my least favourite shot – the killing of the lamb. This shot would have been a part of the sequence I would’ve taken out if I could, however because it’s right in the middle of the clip it would’ve been very difficult to do so. I find it more unpleasant than meaningful or interesting, and scoring it has definitely been my least favourite experience whilst working on this project.
I like the idea of foley being slightly mismatched with what’s on screen – it gives a sort of creepy, disjointed effect. For the sound of the lamb’s blood coming out of its throat I used the Zoom H5 recorder to record the sound of water coming out of my tap:
I also added a small convolution reverb, just to make it sound like it was coming from a slightly bigger room. I’m not sure why I preferred the sound of this, but it seemed to work better with the visuals.
It sort of reflects the image of the blood coming out of the lamb, but has a very calm sound to it which in a way makes the imagery seem more disturbing. I suppose it’s akin to the uncanny valley phenomenon, where robots that look sort of similar to humans but just slightly different can appear very unsettling. The idea of things mostly seeming normal but something just seeming a little off can often be more terrifying than pure gore.
The next shot of the scene is an image of someone’s hands being nailed to a crucifix. This was quite easy to score as all I had to do was record a few hitting sounds and match them up to the video. I recorded myself hitting the side of my kitchen sink with a lighter. This sounded good when I was recording it, however when I played it back it sounded a lot thinner and less metallic than when I had recorded it:
As I couldn’t find any better sounds to use in my home, I decided to stick with this and just edit it in Logic. I added EQ, distortion, reverb and a noise gate – the result sounded like this:
Whilst this doesn’t sound exactly like a hammer going through a hand (I could’ve added a squelching sound from fruit), I think it has a similar effect to the water in the previous shot. It sort of looks like it works, and it’s lined up well, but something’s not quite right – I think this does give the shot a certain charm and creepiness, even if it’s not the most accurate piece of foley.
I decided after this to give the score some room to breathe as the film moves on to a shot of a brick wall. Because the piece is very sonically busy towards the start, I wanted to let it calm down for a couple of minutes. As the film takes us inside a building (possibly a hospital or a morgue), a slow, heavy breath recorded through a contact microphone on my neck comes up in volume, as if the camera is alive – maybe we are seeing the point of view of a real person, walking through the building, staring at strangers, breathing over them. Or perhaps this could be the breath of the unconscious people in shot, lying there as we watch them sleep:
This is actually a recycled recording that I used in my first piece for the course. There’s something about it that’s so strange – it sounds like a ghost breathing down your neck. Although I try not to reuse sounds I’ve used before, I found that this recording worked well with what I was trying to achieve so I put it in the score. I did try to rerecord it however I didn’t manage to get the same sound, and after a while I didn’t see the point in recreating a sound I had already recorded anyway.
When the scene reached the shot of the boy waking up and getting out of bed, I decided I wanted to add a new sound to make it seem as though the boy was being woken up by something. I recorded some layers of harmonics on my bass, which I then faded in to get rid of the plucking sound. This creates a similar sound to an ebow, which I would’ve used if I’d had access to one. Here is the end result of what I recorded:
This sound was achieved using the same plugins that I used for the guitars at the start of the piece – a stock distortion plugin and some reverb, with absolutely no amp simulations used.
Slightly after the harmonics come in, I began to slowly bring up the volume/cutoff of the LFO synth from the beginning of the piece, just to make the clip start to feel a little more busy and overwhelming. This all to start to build up towards the climax of this scene.
As the boy gets up and walks towards the camera, more sounds start to come in to increase the noise and businesses of the piece. I recorded a short clip of me sliding my finger up the neck of my bass, looped it, and then put it onto four different tracks starting at different times:
To match the reveal shot of the boy feeling the screen with his hand, I recorded some more guitars playing different chords all at the exact same time. I think this atonal noise works well when it is synced with the reveal, as it tells the audience that something isn’t right – they don’t know the story of the film yet, and they don’t know who any of these characters are, but the unpleasant noises in the score let them know that something isn’t right.
I let this noise carry on until the end of the piece, and I recorded some more nonsensical noodling on multiple guitar channels, as well as bringing back the banging sound from the crucifixion. I then cut the piece very abruptly, as this is where the title card comes in, and that was the end! I went back in the piece to edit a few levels and add little touches of automation here and there, but after that I decided it was time to finish working on the piece – sometimes it just feels like the natural time to stop.
Here is the unlisted YouTube link to the final result (I will put this at the top of my next blog as well):