Question about recording room tone.

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

When doing audio dubbing you can pretty much put whatever you wish on the soundtrack but if it doesn't compliment or match the visuals you might as well run a loop of white noise on everything or even better 35/16mm sprocket noise like they do with silent films!

I've been watching films made by deaf filmmakers of late, and they don't bother doing anything with sound, including just muting the original production sound track... so one can 'hear' crap going on in the background, either external noises, or 'set noises', or 'heavy breathing'... whatever... because the mic is just on the camera is capturing 'whatever'...

I find it pretty distracting so I just mute the sound...

What do 'pros' do... last March the ABC TV show "Switched at Birth" which has deaf actors who sign, and their dialog is captioned, for the most part there's always a hearing actor doing some speaking, and for the most part they have a 'normal' audio track. However for one episode they went 'silent', and all dialog was signed, with attendant captions.

What did they have for 'sound'... music sometimes it matched the action, some times not... we turned the sound off... it was pretty distracting... Apparently they decided not to go 'absolutely deaf'... perhaps thinking people would complain that their TV was out of whack, or the station was transmitting badly...

 

[Noiz2]

Deaf filmmakers doing their own sound...

I'm trying to think of an appropriate analogy. Maybe a vegetarian chef who puts meat dishes on the menu but never tastes them?

It's a bit well weird. Even "silent" films were never silent. It sounds a bit like the "dogma" films where you stick these arbitrary rules and ignore 100+ years of filmmaking.

I don't know and it probably is different if you have never heard anything VS going deaf later in life, but I suspect the deaf people "hear" plenty - they just don't hear what we hear. Your ears just pick up vibrations, you "hear" in your brain. So I highly suspect that deaf folks "hear" what they see, so "silence" is probably not the most accurate (and certainly not the most interesting) choice.

I'm sure you are at least partially correct on the reason for not having no sound. There is a long standing edict that you never have nothing. This is probably not necessary these days with digital but it was and is with optical tracks. No signal would tend to freak out the sensor and you would get unwanted electrical noises. There is a whole category of "silent" sounds that get tossed in whenever you go to "nothing". "Yellow Sky" was the "Wilhelm scream" of silent sounds and was used all over the place.