Film Process24th April

Rhythm of the edit. Sound Design. Cécile narrator.

Cutting to the rhythm of the waves is such an obvious one , but only occurred to me once I started to place the still images next to one another, without an idea of how long they should last, or whether the transitions between them should be long and slow, dissolving into one another, or hard and precise. Once I decided to lay the track of the sea underneath the whole film, the rhythm of the piece became clearly defined and I had to cut to the waves building and breaking (mostly breaking). Listening to them, it was clear that they weren't breaking equally. Although they did always break, there was an incoherence to the length of time it took to break, and the size of the wave, which gave a louder and longer sound. There was also the sound of smaller waves building and breaking alongside. I'm sure there's a proper word for this, but I looked at the sound waves themselves.

When choosing which bit to put where, I wanted the most rhythmic and reassuringly repetitive and regular rhythm to be at the point where Cécile counts the waves. To put irregular rhythm somehow goes against the grain of what she is communicating, which is the mirroring of the waves with a heartbeat. No-one wants an irregular heartbeat. So, not, for example this section:

There's differences between the length of gaps in the breaking of the waves, and a messy kind of sub wave formation at the beginning that makes the distinction between clear separate waves more difficult to hear. The section below shows a much more regular rhythm:

The waves at the beginning are all of an equal length, volume and rhythm. These are the four that I will use when Cécile counts, but as they are at the beginning of the track, I will edit them to fit. It would make narrative sense for the next section to be a tad more irregular, as it is the section where Cécile goes 'inside herself' and the slightly less reasonable/real/ordered state of normality takes over.