Treatment
Sound Design
Acoustics, wave formation, aural detailing, frequency and atmospherics:
these things are integral to many plot factors in The Sound
of Milk. In place of a traditional film score, The
Sound of Milk will feature a dense ambient soundscape.
Scale, space, mass, density, gravity, atmosphere and climate will be
conveyed primarily through sound effects such as: massive surroundsound
rumbles, multi-channel spatialization, sheets of overpowering noise.
I also aim to create the sense of the merged continental shifts of Australasia
by sourcing sounds from a range of actual locations. Extensive digital
processing will be carried out on actual sounds recorded in Tokyo, Osaka,
Hong Kong, Singapore, Melbourne, Hobart and Alice Springs.
Substantial work has been completed on sections of the sound design,
working from sound effects libraries I have amassed over the last 8
years. A significant budget advantage will be the use of my own digital
surround sound work-station.
Production Design
The sound design for The Sound of Milk will have direct
bearing on the visual production design. A reliance on the soundtrack
to convey largeness of scale will cut back on the cost of building huge
sets and will provide an alternative to the tyrannical budget-driven
aesthetic of pushing sci-fi as a grand mode of cinema.
The exterior action can be divided into two areas. The male domain of
Lock-1 will be shot mostly at night in the downtown narrow market streets
of a Hong Kong, Singapore and/or Seoul. The female domain of WoSpan
and the Periphery Desert separating the two dimensions will be shot
at day in the Australian central desert. Both environments have great
visual appeal. Both are symbolically appropriate to convey the dry,
rustic quality of the warrior women and the seedy, sweaty, dark quality
of the unscrupulous men.
The film keeps action as close to the characters’ physical being
as possible. The more elaborate issues of production design are to be
handled in the drafting and construction of miniature objects which
characters hold or connect to their bodies in some way. Women have their
SpeedEars for communicating to each other; the StunGlobe guns which
are concealed in their breast plates; their VideoDomes for surveying
data. Men have their Abdomen Plates; A-Guns for entering the WoSpan
dimension; CorpCores inserted into their spines; VoCoders for communicating
to one another.
 |
 |
 |
| WoSpan
Central |
WoSpan
Rim |
Alien
Hives |
 |
 |
 |
| The
Milking |
SexClub |
ConStore |
 |
 |
 |
| Dimensional
Wall |
SpeedEar |
Abdomen
Plates |
 |
 |
 |
| TransOrb |
StunGlobe |
VideoDome |
 |
 |
 |
| A-Guns |
HoverCar
|
VaporDome |
Post-Production Effects
Computer graphics for The Sound of Milk can be divided
into two areas: full-screen environments (eg. the travelling of the
TransOrbs through the underground passages of WoSpan Rim), and digitally
composited matte shots (eg. the Dimensional wall dividing the two dimensions).
Development of large parts of these animated sequences will commence
in pre-production (module designs, texture-mapping, movement execution,
etc.). Positioning and compositing will be carried into post-production.
The visual look for the film is based on a meld of Edo period Japanese
prints and paintings. The style will be more of a flat hyper-designed
look than an old world European naturalism which tends to govern many
of the more grand sci-fi spectacles. Illusion is not the central concern
of The Sound of Milk: this is a film about ideas of
how sex and gender will be in the future.
Some preliminary low-level test sketches of these ideas can be seen/heard
in the
DVD short The
Sound of Milk (Prologue) produced with the assistance
of the Australian Film Commission's Strand-X fund in 2004.
