The sound of Gravity( Spolier alert)

Hey everyone, recently I saw the film Gravity Directed by Alfonso Cuaron. The story or plot of the movie is about a crew in space working on the Hubble telescope. While working on the telescope, there is debris flying throughout space, which ends up hitting them and destroying their space ship, leaving only two astronauts alive (Sandra bullock and George Clooney). These two astronauts have to find a way to stay alive and use an emergency escape pod to get back to earth.

            I really enjoyed the film; it was relatively slow paced so you have to be in the right mood to watch it. What I really enjoyed about the film was the way they handled the sound design of it while keeping in mind that there is no sound in space. One of the ways they did this was with the way the spoke in their suits. If you were to imagine how someone would sound like in a space suit I think they nailed it, it sounded a little muffled and boxy.

            To describe the next example I need to explain how we hear sound. Sound propagates by displacing molecules through a medium, which could be air, water or an object. Without a medium sound cannot be produced. In space there is no air so sound can only travel through objects. In the scene where Sandra bullock is in the space station and trying to escape in the escape pod shows this phenomenon. The space station is going up in flames and exploding and you can hear all of this because your in there with her, she continues and goes into the escape pod and you continue to hear the explosions. As soon as she detaches the pod from the space station the sound builds up into a ring and quickly goes away. The sound went away because it was no longer connected to the space station and sound needs a medium to travel through. I do doubt that the ring would occur in real life but that added to the suspense of the movie.

            Overall I really enjoyed this film, it had a nice story line to it, kind of corny lines at first but it gets better, the sound design of it was great, and there are many more examples of how the sound designer plays with how it should really sound like and how to make it sound cool to the audience. I recommend everyone to check out this film!