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LFS WORKSHOPS INTERVIEW: GUSTAVO COSTANTINI Gustavo Costantini is an Argentinean sound designer and editor, and also a musician, working on feature films, documentaries, theatre and sound installations and video art. He is Researcher and Professor of Sound and Editing at the University of Buenos Aires, University of Cinema, and at the National University Institute for the Arts (IUNA). Gustavo is also a visiting lecturer of renowned universities and film schools around the world. Do you think that sound and music get overlooked in films?
Sometimes I’m hired by directors at an advanced stage of their film edit, and they want me to do something with the sound. But if no-one made room for sound in the early stages of the film – the script, the shoot – the chances of improving the sound are minimal.
Yes, I do! It’s really rare for someone to notice any of the sound ideas in films. People like the actors, or notice the photography, the production design, the costumes etc. If someone pays attention to the music, it’s usually because they like a melody. But almost nobody is receptive to the function of that music, in terms of the meaning it produces - even less so when it comes to sound.
Anyway, sometimes you can do a lot during post, but maybe you have to make a lot of changes and compromise your original idea. Sometimes this works out great, and we will also discuss examples where the editing process forced a complete re-thinking of the film.
This is not a criticism of the audience – it’s down to our culture, which is visually centered. You go to “see” a film... Ok, it would be a little bit silly to say “I will go to see and hear a film”, but the fact that we say we go to “see” a film indicates that the image comes first.
Is it ever too early to start thinking about sound and music? No, of course not. The starting point for many great contemporary films was a single image in the director’s mind, with an accompanying sound or piece of music. David Lynch is one of the best examples. He says that for him, Blue Velvet began with the flowers of the opening sequence and the Bobby Vinton song. With Lost Highway it was the vertiginous “road loop” and the David Bowie song, I'm Deranged. If you read most screenplays by the Coen brothers – even their early films – you will find dozens of sound details already there, expressed through words.
There's a reason for this. The ergonomics of cinema implies that you have to face the screen, whether sound is present or not – even if the sound is mono, stereo or surround. And the birth of film as we know it was silent, although the idea of having sound was there from the very beginning – and not just in the form of a piano accompaniment. For a lot of inexperienced filmmakers (and some experienced ones) sound is the last thing to think about. Why should we start thinking about sound before shooting?
Similarly, it’s never too early to begin focusing on sound and music in your filmmaking career as a whole. You should start creating sound ideas from the very beginning. Many first films lack any sound ideas or sound space, explaining everything
Well, one of the things my workshop promotes is an appreciation for just how important sound is in most “cinematic situations”. The sound in many of these situations is post produced, but much of it is conceived during the writing process. If you don't create the “space” for sound in your script, many times it’s almost impossible to do it later in post.
through words instead. This is not necessarily wrong! But the more a filmmaker can integrate their images with music and sounds, the more cinematic the experience will be for their audience. 1
How do you teach filmmakers to explore sound and music?
voice, music, words, and the perceptions involved in the process of receiving these elements. The culmination was the seminal work Audiovision, now used in every film school all over the world. Later he developed all of these works to produce some very deep and definitive books, such as Le Son (inexplicably not translated into English), and Film, a Sound Art (an updated version of Le Son au Cinéma, but including deep reflections from almost 30 years of thinking about these matters).
I use lots of different strategies. One is to show a clip without the sound and to make people guess which sounds will be there – not as a contest, but as a way of getting people to think about images and their potential sounds. This is very useful because besides the fun of guessing, we get to discuss the material as if we are a team of sound designers and/or editors. Another exercise is to read a scene from a screenplay and identify all the potential sound producing elements. When it comes to music, sometimes I encourage the participants to notice the more subtle elements of the music – the timbre, the qualities of the sounds themselves. This offers quite a new perspective to most filmmakers.
In a way, if you have any interest in Sound Design or related topics, it is almost impossible not to discuss Chion at some point. Claudia Gorbman, a great scholar on film music and film sound, once wrote about Chion: “He is a poet in theoretician's clothing”. LFS, January 2013
One of the highlights of the workshop is when we analyse exclusive, raw material given to me by Walter Murch. It’s from his collaboration with Anthony Minghella on The Talented Mr Ripley. We get to watch the opening sequence of a major production develop and evolve from first assembly right the way through to the final version. Fascinating!
Gustavo Costantini presents following workshop at The London Film School: Sound & Music Techniques for Narrative Filmmaking Return to LFS website
But there are many approaches. I try to be insightful but also entertaining – both things if possible! Why do you endorse Michel Chion’s theories over others who have written extensively on the subject? I guess Michel is the one and only. He started out as a composer of musique concrète (he still is a wonderful composer) and as a researcher, and he has the privilege of knowing the great Pierre Schaeffer, one of the most influential figures in Sound. But 30 years ago he also began to write about sound and music in film. His first book on the subject was Voice in Cinema, a truly insightful and influential book celebrated by figures such as Gilles Deleuze, Christian Metz and Slavoj Zizek. The work was surprisingly new, covering many areas which had been neglected for years. That book opened a gate, and it was followed by two more books completing a sort of trilogy: Le Son au Cinéma and La Parole au Cinéma (not translated into English). Because of the impact of these books, Michel continued researching and thinking about sound, 2
