Project 3 ‧ Adding Sound to the 1902 Silent Film A Trip to the Moon
“A Trip to the Moon (French: Le Voyage dans la Lune)[a] is a 1902 French adventure short film directed by Georges Méliès… the film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the Moon’s surface, escape from an underground group of Selenites (lunar inhabitants), and return to Earth with a captive Selenite” –Wikipedia
The film’s genre is Sci-fi/Adventure and “is widely regarded as a landmark film in the origins of cinema and showcased the fantasy elements of storytelling and special effects” –Imdb.
Taking inspiration from films such as Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I went for an eerie, mysterious, and comical genre.
I found sci-fi to not fit in with the film being older, so I minimized that.
The first thing I did was watch the film and then edit it down to one minute, in the edit I tried to maintain the main event in the story which is the astronauts exploring the moon.
Next I watched the edit and took notes on every scene and the different sounds that I could possibly add. This included aspects that weren’t necessarily the most obvious such as footsteps, a waterfall, different metallic sounds and so on. One of my favorite sounds that I added in would have to be the mushroom growing, I tried using a sci-fi sound but found the cartoon one way more effective for this film and its absurdity.
I decided that I wanted the humans to have dialogue as well as the aliens, but I didn’t want either to have understandable dialogue. So what I did was reverse diffrent phrases such as “I’m so over it”, so the outcome still had the same energy but wasn’t a understandable language. For the Poofs I used Poof sounds layered with diffrent swooshes and at times erring decaying effects.
I also made a sound especially for the aliens, it was hard to find a sound that encapsulated everything happening, so I made one that included marching, armor, and alien/ creature sounds.
Overall this was a fun project to figure out. However I do feel it’s too fast paced, I wanted to work on just a minute of footage and really get into it yet I do think some more time in between all the action could have improved this project.