Silence Can Be Golden

Movies are just moving pictures. Right?

Legendary director, Alfred Hitchcock, is said to have loved silence. Perhaps that can be traced to his beginnings during the era of silent film.

Certainly, some of the most remembered sequences from his films could very well have been silent. If there was sound, it was natural noise. If there was dialogue, it was more often than not unintelligible.

Think of the guy falling from the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur. The championship tennis match, (not to mention the fairgrounds sequence) in Strangers on a Train. And in Rope, it's the maid clearing the trunk, quietly observed by the camera -- the main actors aren't even on screen.

These golden moments of silence can be very powerful.

Sometimes, when you're editing a movie, you have something all planned out. But then you find a moment of silence -- quite serendipitously. Which is what has happened in one particular spot in our feature film, Under Jakob's Ladder.

As we were editing one section of the movie -- a scene involving a character who angrily throws a box against a wall -- we wrote music to underscore the tension of the moment. However, on one of the renders, we noticed something missing from this scene. The music had disappeared, but only on that section of the scene. (This would have been due to us muting the track that held the music before rendering the scene out to watch it.)

And that particular moment had become silent. Well, not completely silent. But the music was gone. And the moment became stronger with its absence.

Sometimes, action is louder than words.

Or music, in this case.