For my specialism i chose to look into Sound production.
Beggs, R. (2018). Richard Beggs. [online] IMDb. Available at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0066740/ [Accessed 15 Jan. 2018].
Known for: Children of Men (2006), Apocalypose Now (1979) and Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2006).
Current Projects: Suspended Belief.
When researching into Richard Beggs, I’ve found that he prefers to have free reign over the sound design of the movie. he will often opt to have separate tracks for all of the music and the vocals, so that he is free to add reverb and play around with the sound to find the right way to present it.
This is displayed in his work on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The sound design for this movie fits really well with the picture. From the very first scene, when Harry blows up Aunt Marge, the way that the diegetic and non-diegetic sound makes up the scene is clever. Each scene has the musical make up which gives it its own individuality.
Specific scenes like the Knight Buss scene show this, where the soundtrack is quirky, and the music has a fast, clearly audible beat to it, and making great use of the string instruments such as the violin, and the base drum to make a great, contrasting soundtrack that has a heavy impact. When Stan starts talking about Sirius Black, the jolly sounds drop out of it, and you are left with a low, fast paced tone that has no nigher notes in, and the jarring change between the two makes you uncomfortable, suiting the uncomfortable conversation to follow the change.
Another way that Beggs uses certain instruments and tracks in order to create suspense in a scene is the Great Hall scene, where Dumbledore is giving his start of term speech to the students. The scene starts of with no musical soundtrack, in fact, the only sound giving the scene atmosphere is Dumbledore speaking and the sound of the rain on the roof of the great hall. However, this all changes when Dumbledore warns the students to give the dementors not reason to harm them. This is when a violin and maybe a flute are introduced, but they play very much out of sync with each other, in a tune that is unnerving and unsettling. This could be seen as an effort to jar the viewer, and make them as uncomfortable about the situation as the students and the professor. The rain only leads into this jarring symphony, and it added a sense of unease. However, as soon as Dumbledore’s conversation takes a turn for the friendly side, saying ‘Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on a light’, there is an immediate lift to the tune. It is as though the mention of light has activated the lighter notes of the song, and brings it into a much warmer, full bodied symphony, which settles the viewer for the next scene, as a pose to the stringy, unsettling, whiny tune beforehand.
There are various sound effects unique to the movies that would be possible for me to recreate. In the boggart scene, the whirlwind sound that the boggart creates when changing form would require a lot of experimentation with wind sounds to try and recreate - other sound would be the sound of rain and wind together during the quidditch match, the squeaking of the door the boggart is kept in and whistling of spells through the air in the final few scenes.
All of these have bases in real world, but all of them will also need tweaking to recreate exactly the sound make in the movies. There isn’t a lot of material on how Beggs created these noises, but one could speculate that there would be have a lot of experimentation with a bank of library noises.
Soundsonline-forums.com. (2018). Richard Beggs master class - sound design - Soundsonline-Forums. [online] Available at: http://www.soundsonline-forums.com/showthread.php?t=30499 [Accessed 15 Jan. 2018].
IMDb. (2018). Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). [online] Available at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0304141/reviews [Accessed 15 Jan. 2018].