Taken;Sound evaluation;HarryWainwright

Taken, the sound essay

This is the entire narrative of the whole film rapped up into one, 1 minute clip. The scene when Liam Neeson threatens the antagonist about his daughter’s disappearance. During the evaluation of this clip I am going to analyse the different sounds and effects used to emphasise he moods and tensions within the scene.

The scene starts with diegetic sound with no back music or non-diegetic is sound. The speech is muffled and is tense. This adds a specific mood for the audience to react to and sets the mood for the rest of the scene. The mood set is continued on I the next frame when the non-diegetic music kicks in and adds suspense to the scene. This gets the audience ready for an important feature within the film and causes them to believe something valuable to the narrative is going to happen. The music is faint and in a high pitch implying that something jumpy or ‘scary’ is going to happen. This is a very common and important convention to the thriller genre. Another less common but more effective convention is a just diegetic scene with no tense mood setting music just the natural sounds creating the tense emotions normally created by the music.

The following frame you hear the music lower creating a deep and harsh tone. The audience now know the seriousness of the scene and have judged the situation. They are now ready for the main part of the scene. The music ends after he says “I will find you” in a distraught tone, the music finishes in a high jumpy way. The audience were unprepared and confused about the misjudged ending to the music and the use of the new, rarely used convention. This ‘new’ convention is normally unseen but has a great effect on the audience as it was preparing the viewers for something and hitting them with nothing else. A silence which is then turned into a threat by the tone of voice and context it’s in. Now the sound of silence is herd and the music kicks in and the audience is back to feeling the building tension on what the antagonist will reply to.

 The penultimate thriller convention is the diegetic music coming to another end with a high pitched, intense and sudden climax. This thrills the audience as they now know what the scene was about. The last convention is the speech said by the antagonist. He says “good luck” in again, a muffled, gloomy mysterious voice. This now leaves the audience in a vulnerable position and leaves them wanting to watch the rest of the film.

Sound has a massive part to play in main conventions of all films and helps emphasise feelings and displays moods in better, more sophisticated ways. It can be used in many forms and is portrayed in many contexts to unveil, more times than not, a hidden meaning within a certain scene.

    

Harry Wainwright