The trip to the Museum of Moving Image allowed me to see firsthand the various technologies I’d learned about of the course of my media education. In past media classes we had discussed the progression from the daguerreotype to the modern film camera, but I’d never had the chance to see what these devices looked like. The third floor of the museum was dedicated almost exclusively to the rise of film and television. We went from exhibit to exhibit seeing zoetrope to the massive live broadcast television cameras of the 1950s. This game me some perspective as I’d previously never realized just how large film equipment had been, and seeing it was shocking considering the quality of picture you can squeeze out of a cell phone camera.
After touring the archetypes that laid the foundation for today’s modern equipment we were sent into a sound tutorial. We were shown without sound a dramatic sequence from Vertigo and then re-watched it with 4 different sound tracks played over it. We were asked to determine which sound track worked best with the inherently dramatic scene. Each of the pieces was carefully chosen, because each of the pieces had similarities, but only one was an exact match to the ebb and flow of the tension and release of the scene. During this exercise we also discussed the process of how sound is added to film. One of the more shocking things we were told was that all the scores for the film were written entirely afterwards. This may seem obvious, but nonetheless some scenes generally seem as if they were written with music in mind.
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