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"Polaris"

Are you going to have whooshy sounds?

I've been agitating to not have whooshy sounds or other "Star Wars" sound elements. I would rather the scenes in space rely on music. That worked so well in "2001" and even to some extent (though they were inconsistent about it) in the Walter Koenig film "MoonTrap"

I think that sort of verisimilitude would go over well with our target audience who are the more sophisticated science fiction fans.

The final decision is not mine, however. But I thought I'd just stir the pot a little.
 
I tried that with Project: Potemkin, and tried as I might, I decided that audiences need that audio. We went with a rumble sort of noise more than a whoosh, but without it, and even with music, the scene was just sort of flat. I think Dennis and his production team are making the right decision with the sound effect.
 
They used a sort of deep throbbing noise (ooh matron) with the Prometheus and following ships in SG-1. It was clever enough not to be whooshy but obviously associated with the ship every time we saw it.
 
Try doing a fly by with audio only! We use fly by SFX in Excelsior simply because there's no way else to convey that particular bit of action. Oh well...sometimes science just has to take a backseat to dramatic needs. :shrug:
 
So do I. A lot actually. It's pretty incredible what a good score can do for a film. It certainly gives that shot a sense of foreboding. I also really like the sound FX that was done for the Polaris. It has that nice basey rumble, but then that little high pitched turbocharger-esque whine when it goes by.

Looks awesome.
 
Sound trumps picture quite often. A beautifully shot film with crappy sound feels cheap. I spent a fair amount of time on the rough mix for the rough cut because I knew that unpolished sound is really distracting. Ralph Miller took my rough mix and enhanced and sweetened the holy #%$% out of it.
 
The sound was very impressive in both clips, but I really liked it in the first one. All the chatter in the background made it sound more like people were busy doing things.
I'm not sure if this has been covered earlier in the thread, but how will the film be distributed? Internet, DVD/Blu-ray, or perhaps both?
 
I really hate "command centers" which are really quiet except for the leads talking. I felt that we really needed to make this ship feel alive, so I wrote a bunch of chatter and had a voice actor record it. It's all specific to the scene, not generalized, so it's correct in tone.
 
In a few spots I found some of the background voices could get distracting, and if I lowered them too much, they vanished. I wanted you to sense that people were talking but not let you make out what they were saying. To fix that, I actually ran some of those audio loops backwards, which renders them unintelligible, much like a conversation you can't quite make out.

I love tricks like that. :)
 
It's in the uncanny valley of low budget. It feels like it's trapped somewhere between amateurish and professional, yet it lacks the charm and warmth of the amateurish. It feels sterile.
 
It's in the uncanny valley of low budget. It feels like it's trapped somewhere between amateurish and professional, yet it lacks the charm and warmth of the amateurish. It feels sterile.
Probably has a great future ahead of it as a SyFy movie of the week then. ;)

I think it's difficult to get much sense of the feel of the thing from this short clip. Whether it feels more comfortable, or more of the same when (if) you watch the finished product is anyone's guess. :)
 
the production values look better than babylon 5 managed on tv and people wank on about that all the time. looking forward to this :)
 
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