AES Student Blog

 1) Tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from and what do you study?

This was my first entry. It was from my thesis film "Thicker than Water". I did all the sound works except composing. We shot the film for 11 days in October, 2017, and I did the post sound mixing from March to May, 2018. The story happens at Anna, Illinois, in 1890s. A crippled white boy Jacob develops a friendship with a mysterious white-looking newcomer Silas, and his racist worldview is threatened when he discovers that Silas is really black.
In this story, there are some important parts which need a lot of sound design, such as river, Yemaya (river god), bells and death whistle.
Director wanted a sound for Yemaya. Silas defined Yemaya as the mother of water. And, our composer had already created a main theme melody before our shooting. So, I decided to use a woman vocal as Yemaya’s sound. The woman vocal hums the melody when she is summoned. Actually I was the voice actress for Yemaya and the singer of credits music.
“When someone dies on the tree, a bell gets hung from the branch.” Bells were always connected with water and Yemaya. To get clear and accurate bells’ sound, I borrowed the bells in different sizes from PD department and recorded many different bells sound during my foley session.
Silas’s death whistle in the film was a Chinese traditional ocarina actually. I found there was a real death whistle in the world. It sounds like thousands of people screaming. That was exactly what I wanted, so I bought one online! However, I thought the sound would be too simple for the death whistle in this story. To make the sound richer, I also added the sound of ocarina, one high pitch sound and one mid pitch sound.