“A Deafening noise” is an experimental short-film that investigates the relation between sound phenomena and the uncanny. It shows how is that those hidden episodes of life, the ones that we have forced to oblivion, return in the form of sensation, in this case, of a noise never heard before. The conflict here presented, takes place in a familiar environment, which had to be carefully built, in terms of image but mostly of sound treatment, in order to produce the effect of the sudden, of the passive disruption of life inherent to the uncanny. Technically speaking, this meant working first on the sound background, ambient, foleys, dubbed dialogs, and natural effects, to prepare the viewer/listener for the appearance of the noise felt by the protagonist.
Once we had control over the sound mix, we had to imagine how the deafening noise would sound, and here the plot helped us to determine the reference elements that had to be implied. At a point on the film, the protagonist says that he ran over a cyclist driving at night. There we had a sound! But of course the reference couldn’t be so obvious, it had to be obliterated somehow to justify the action on the film, that’s why he asks around if others hear the noise, because he is not capable to link the external phenomena with the deadly episode. We picked the sound of a bicycle smashing against a wall, glass breaking and food digesting, and combined them into something new through a technique called granulation, which consists on digitally picking samples of sound inputs altering their parameters (such as pitch, duration, delay) randomly. We made a thousand essays until we got the noise we were looking for. After this, we selected the hit points to the appearance of the noise in the film, making these decisions along with the plot and the acting.
“Any sound, after a while hearing it, disappears”, says the priest, but that doesn’t seems to relieve the protagonist. After a depressing afternoon walk, he seems to be hungry. The noise now is quite similar to a stomach aching. Absurdly, eating a hotdog makes the noise stop, just as every sound around the protagonist. But not for long, the guilt always returns. The irruption of a group of cyclists on the frame, and a hundred wheels surrounding the ears of the protagonist, precedes the triumph of the uncanny over reality itself.