Slumdog Millionaire
The movie was great, no doubt.
For more people talking about how great it was, see the Metacritic page.
Now, I will talk about something very specific about the movie...
I spent a chunk of the movie trying to figure out what about the movie made it feel so different from Filipino movies. The similarities are striking - a rags to riches story, star-crossed lovers, a rich crime syndicate, sweaty police men, an urban-slum setting...
But there was something about the production of the movie that made it feel more powerful, something that Filipino movies always lacked - sound design!
Filipino movies have an awful habit of not editing out the ambient sounds from a shot, which make them feel really dirty and unprofessional. Contrast that to Slumdog's amazing soundtrack, which is lauded by everyone, and you end up with scenes that are a hundered times more powerful.
This shot from Slumdog Millionaire looks like it could be from a Filipino movie.
This reminds me of a project I worked on in my first semester. We had a week to make a game for one of our classes. We ended up making a game about gods destroying cities, and all throughout development, I couldn't understand why it wasn't working. All the mechanics were in place and all the necessary visuals were there, but I still felt like it was such a bad game. Finally, the day before submission, we incorporated all the sounds (which we had put off doing in lieu of "fixing the design") and like magic, the game was AWESOME.
In Gods' Hands was terrible before we put in all the sounds.
So the next time you're creating something, don't just focus on the visuals! Sound is like that co-worker who no one thinks of. One day, he's going to come in to work with a sawed-off shotgun and blow everyone's faces away. Then you'll say to yourself, "I wish I paid more attention to that guy!"
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