I was recently watching the Sixth Sense, which prompted me to wonder if I’m the only one that feels like some movies feel truly impossible to follow everything in the story without captions. For this movie specifically, Haley Joel Osment’s character was difficult to hear in his particular speech patterns and hushed voice.
I know Tenet is infamously not-great with it’s sound design that this could be another example.
What are some of yours? Tell me I’m not the only one.
Any. I watch everything with subtitles, one, because it gives my dopamine-deprived brain more to latch onto, and two, my husband and I belong to those horrible people who’ll talk over the movie and would miss half the dialogue if it weren’t for subtitles.
But apart from my personal aberrances, apparently it’s becoming more common for people to rely on subtitles because sound editing in general has become worse recently (though I wouldn’t know why or what exactly is different now). So you’re definitely not the only one.
I watch every movie and show with subtitles. It’s just easier because I don’t have to turn the volume up so much and I can eat while watching without missing any dialogue and if someone talks over I still don’t miss anything. Sometimes there are snippets in dialogue I’m not even sure you are supposed to hear them but you can still read them in the subtitles.
Sometimes there are snippets in dialogue I’m not even sure you are supposed to hear them but you can still read them in the subtitles.
This is the big one for me. If I hear a character mumbling but the subtitles say “[incoherent mumbling]” then I don’t worry about it. But if i hear a character mumbling and the subtitles actually show me what they’re saying, I know the audience was supposed to have understood it.
Or some far away dude yelling something in the background.
Christopher Nolan is my favorite director and least favorite sound engineer.
Modern stuff seems to require subtitles on, older stuff doesn’t. Weird that. Like they’re getting worse at sound design
there are two reasons for that!
older older movies often didn’t have much sound design, you heard what the people on set heard and maybe one sound effect or two if they wanted a gunshot without shooting guns on set
most movies today are sound mixed for cinema, which almost always has a very expensive set up of speakers with one (or two) central speakers reserved specifically for dialogue. noticed how when you’re at the cinema you don’t need subtitles as often even though you’re crunching through popcorn? but the problem arises when the producers decide they can’t be bothered to hire the sound guy to make a separate sound mix for streaming or DVD and just mince the 7.1 speaker mix through your stereo headphones, squishing all the dialogue together with everything else without a care for the physical differences in playback
older movies often didn’t have much sound design, you heard what the people on set heard
I really enjoy how old movies have their actors speak with a “theatre voice,” clearly annunciated, typically the same accent, loud for the people in the back.
They’re getting worse at everything. Now no one sweats, ever, and all the backgrounds are blurry.
Set the volume to 100 when people are talking. Quickly set it to 5 when there’s a anything else. You need to bounce between 5 and 100 all the time to make the movie tolerable.
What’s the deal with this sound design? If I keep the volume at 5, I’ll miss 90% of the dialogue. If I keep it at 100, the movie will shatter my ears, and then I’m permanently done with movies. What exactly are the sound engineers trying to achieve here? Why are movies designed to be so unwatchable?
I don’t understand either why the sound mixing is so bad on TVs. Makes me just want to down-sample everything to stereo.
Except Primer. “Hmmersm in the mmmupffp” “Yeah but mmhhurmm the box”
I don’t know, I just watched Casablanca the other day and boy did I need subtitles…
Or if it’s in a dialect that can be hard to understand. I remember watching a Scottish movie without subtitles not understanding a word said till about half way through. I had to rewatch it from the beginning now that I could mostly translate what was said.
Trainspotting
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