Overall approach to sound for 'No Country For Old Men'

I tried, as I'm sure is what a sound designer is supposed to do, to match the tone of the picture/scene in the sounds I used for this exercise. I decided to use to my advantage the fact that I haven't seen the film yet, and approach the soundtrack how I thought was appropriate, rather than having preconceptions about what sounds needed to be included from how someone else approached the scene.

I decided my approach would be to tell the story from the character's POV. This meant I didn't use as extensive a range of foley as I would have normally (the main sound from the character is footsteps, as this, according to what I've been told about the film by others, is what the character would focus on most).

One way I tried to tell the story from the character's POV was to automate effects such as reverb to reduce in intensity as they would for the character in the film-world. This screenshot shows how I automated the reverb on the key in the door to the motel room to reduce sharply as the character steps from the reverberant hallway into the more acoustically-dead bedroom.


One of my lecturers, Ron, told me that the film relies a lot of silence and what sounds aren't included as much as what sounds are included, and I thought this approach seemed appropriate and fit in with the one I was taking (which gave me confidence in that I must have been on the right track). This again ties in with telling the story from the character's point-of-view - what people have told me about the film is that the character suspects he's being tracked somehow (how, we find out in this scene) and so is listening to every sound closely.

To contrast this, I tried to add a sense of realism through the atmoses - in particular, the first atmos I used in the bedroom (before the character wakes up and opens the case of money) I recorded using the 'worldising' technique. I placed a Rode NT4 in a room in my house and recorded the sound of an American sitcom playing on television in another room of the house. However, this didn't sound convincing enough to sound like someone in another room in the motel was up watching television (which was my intention), and so this recording still needed processing before I came to mix the sound, and I used EQ to ease off the higher frequencies, making it sound more muffled, as though it was heard through a wall.

Aside from my approach to the technical side of things, I decided to record all the sounds for this exercise myself for two reasons:
1) I have experience of spending more time searching through soundbanks for specific sounds than it would generally take to record my own sounds;
2) I wanted to develop my recording skills, as this is something I've typically avoided in the past.