Soundtrack Creation and SphereTrax CEO Sefi Carmel on bringing the world of Deep Fear (2023)
From our experience as moviegoers and sound designers, the ambiences which create the cinematic world the characters live in are often ignored. That’s because, in real life, we are so accustomed to our sight that we automatically filter out those vivid environmental sounds around us. In an ideal world, all the perceivable textures of a film, the video and the audio, combine so perfectly and inconspicuously that the viewer is immediately transported to this universe.
So, let’s imagine you are asked to create an underwater soundscape for a shark thriller, such as Deep Fear (2023), directed by Marcus Adams. In that case, it becomes clear that a significant portion of the film will heavily focus on the ambience. With only a few lines of dialogue and music crossing the boundaries with sound design, the underwater atmospheres function as the primary means of communication between the filmmaker and the audience. We at Soundtrack Creation believe that every element of a film soundtrack, including the ambience, should tell the film’s story on its own.
This is very similar to animated features because there was no location sound involved for the underwater part of the film, so we are used to building entire soundscapes from scratch with unique character and flavours. However, how does one design a world we are not used to hearing? A world of vicious white sharks and shipwrecks living deep under the sea is not something the average movie-goer gets to experience regularly. How could we make them instantly believe that they are in this world?
Process
When designing soundscapes, ‘hyperrealism’ in film is a critical factor to consider. Today, audiences expect sound effects and ambiences to sound more extensive than in the real world. Of course, this also varies by genre and aesthetics. However, the point to remember is that by exaggerating sounds, we emphasize what is narratively important to connect the audience with the story and its characters on screen. Precisely for that reason, the underwater ambience in Deep Fear sounds deeper, bigger, and scarier.
In order to achieve this, we opted to take a unique approach and go into the field to make our own recordings of water. During our short trips to Spain and Austria, we took several hours of recordings off the shores of Valencia, Spain to the lakefront of Lake Constance in Bregenz, Austria, as well as various ponds and fountains we bumped into along the way. We wanted to equip ourselves with as many recordings as possible which could be taken into our studio for further editing and processing to build the world of Deep Fear.
It is culturally ingrained that the underwater sounds are muffled and deep. Films such as Thunderball (1965), Jaws (1975), The Abbys (1989), and The Hunt For Red October (1990) are just a few examples. However, most of the recordings captured by hydrophones sound rather dull and often clicky. Without further sound processing, this is actually not how the audience expects the underwater world to sound at all.
In the same way painters use colours to paint a picture, portraying a feeling and experience the viewer can relate to, we, the sound designers, construct an aural world for the story from scratch, using sound. Therefore, access to sound effects that are otherwise impossible to capture on set or elsewhere is essential.
One of the main tools we used to capture these recordings was a stereo hydrophone (one of our paintbrushes if you will). This special microphone lets us record vibrations travelling through water (or other liquids). Transmitting low-frequency sounds is one of the outstanding traits of the underwater environment, and is the primary source of communication for many underwater creatures. For example, speeding up the recordings can create sounds ordinarily inaudible to humans. But is that how we, the audience, expect the aquatic environment to sound?
In Deep Fear, the sounds of reversed water bubbles and metallic squeaks differ from regular diegetic sound effects, which aim to represent a sense of realism. The role of sound effects in dream sequences and flashbacks portrays the subjectivity of a character. In this case, the sound signifies a traumatic experience from a character’s childhood. By combining our Foley recordings with digital processing, we aimed to convey to the audience simultaneously the tangible, realistic aspects of the world of Deep Fear, but also the psychological feelings of its protagonists.
The Soundtrack Creation team was able to build on this level of deep immersion by drawing on our recent experiences on the upcoming fantasy animated feature film, Rebellious, which we mixed in Dolby Atmos. A certain creative license needs to be made when creating soundscapes for the viewers with which to transport them to unusual places and settings. In the cases of Deep Fear and Rebellious, we aimed to realise surreal but familiar experiences: something new to the viewer, deep underwater and a mythical kingdom respectively, that also fell in line with what audiences would expect from those scenarios.
Conclusion
Instead of looking for realism, we wanted to evoke visceral feelings in the audience by using hyper-realistic sound design and Foley to immerse them in the film, striking the right balance of informative and emotive functions of sound to create impactful moments. For example, the sounds of the white shark ripping flesh in Deep Fear (spoiler alert!?). This was an interesting challenge for the Soundtrack Creation team. Our recent project, the aforementioned animated film, Rebellious, required full sound design for a huge mythical dragon. Where do you start with that? We drew on our experiences with that creature in particular to bring this shark to life and we hope that we have created a memorable experience for the audience with our efforts on Deep Fear.
Although many underwater films have used processed recordings of water captured by regular microphones, we achieved many interesting textures by slowing down the ‘real’ hydrophone recordings and applying further processing to get the notoriously missing low-end frequencies.
There are no right answers. It’s all about experimentation and what works for the story. However we got there for this project, our sound design work aims to evoke feelings and events based on the audience’s episodic memories, rather than denote how an underwater ambience actually sounds.
Sefi Carmel, CEO of Creation Entertainment Media
Sefi Carmel is an award-winning London based composer, sound designer, producer and mixer. He has been creating soundtracks for films, TV, commercials and games for over a decade.
His diverse credits range from work on A list Hollywood feature films with the likes of Ridley Scott, John Woo, Chris Columbus and Kevin Reynolds; to mixing, remixing and mastering tracks for David Bowie, Phil Collins, Bruno Mars, Michael Bublé, Massive Attack, BB king and many more.
He has enjoyed success creating scores and soundtracks for Disney, Universal, Buena Vista Miramax, Scott Free, BBC, MTV, ITV, National Geographic, Discovery, Sky, Five, Channel 4, BskyB’s cross platform gaming channels and many more.
Advertising clients include top agencies such as Publicist and M&C Saatchi, and top brands such as Mercedes, BMW, Samsung, and many more.
For more than a decade, Sefi has been mixing all the audio for Steam Motion and Sound. Steam is a high-end creative agency with offices in London, New York, and Sydney. Sefi has mixed hundreds of cinema and TV commercials and trailers for Steam, working for A list clients such as Cameron Macintosh, Warner Bros, Decca, Universal, Vodafone and many more.
His soundtracks are an exciting hybrid of epic, cinematic orchestral and cutting-edge electronic music, using superb live musicians coupled with larger-than-life sound design, mixed in earth shattering 5.1 surround, to create that big cinema experience.
