Blog #1: Museum of the Moving Image

Museums are awesome. That being said, ones that allow you to actively participate with half of the exhibits make for an even greater experience. The Museum of the Moving Image is proudly one of those places where you never have to fear “getting to close” or leaning on the walls.

At the Museum of the Moving Image, there are several exhibits that we, as students, were encouraged to-for lack of a better phrase-mess with. We danced in front of a camera to form a flipbook of the images, we replaced the voice of the lovable pig, Babe, with our own awkward mumblings. Using stop motion, we were able to make a polar bear dive head first into a jar of Fluff. We reinvented the sound effects in a scene from the movie,The Mask, and even put delightfully romantic music behind one of the most dramatic and climatic scenes of the movie Independence Day.

Suffice to say, we had fun.

Of all the exhibits, the one I found the most interesting was the one that included adding sound effects to any given movie scene. Due to unavoidable noises and low sound pick up on the set, almost every sound you hear in a movie has been put in, or enhanced, after the scene has been filmed.

An artist, known as a Foley, gathers different items that might make the sounds similar to those heard during the scene in the movie. The Foley operator then goes to a room with a projection of the scene and attempts to match or enhance the sounds we would hear.

One of the truly interesting parts of this job is the random items they use to make sounds we take for granted. On my own time, I learned that footsteps are improved by wax paper. The sound of horses hooves are coconuts (Ever seen the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail?). Think about this: In a violent movie scene, what does a person being stabbed sound like? No one is stabbed, obviously, but that sound must be created some how. And it is, since apparently in the film industry the sound of person and a watermelon being stabbed are remarkably similar. To our relief, Foleys prefer the watermelon.