Most of you who like to watch 'making of' or 'BTS' of your favorite movies or TV shows, must have heard of -'50% visual and 50% sound makes 100% cinema' theory. I disagree to this theory because they often make it as a general statement. Mostly they say this merely to make awareness about sound design, which is valid. But I disagree that this ration of 50-50 applies to each movie and each episode. Some times it can be 90% visual and 10% sound and vice-versa in some other cases. But this scene from La casa de papel is purely effective because of its stellar sound design. I also came across some philosophical and psychological reasoning behind placements of sounds.
This specific scene from Money Heist- a Netflix original series created by Álex Pina, is a ‘make or break’ moment for the professor.Since the police inspector is already on her way to the junkyard, the professor’s goal is to reach there before her and wipe out his fingerprints from the interior of a car.
The previous scene ends with the non-diegetic sound of a motorcycle which becomes a diegetic sound when it transitions to this scene. Initially along with suspicious music a sound of a helicopter blades whizzing (non-diegetic sound) is mixed with other diegetic sounds, only for a few seconds to portray the chaos professor is facing until he manages to break the fence.A deep ambient echo is compressed under the diegetic sounds of professor’s heavy breathing, his footsteps on metal trash, car doors and a point of audition that most likely comes from the professor’s backpack. The transition to empathetic music is audible when the professor gets inside the car. The pace of the music rises, and the diegetic sounds such as- chemicals being poured on towel, cleaning the wheel, gear and other interior parts of the car, professor breathing- becomes louder, increasing the tension.
The interesting thing about this scene is, when the professor extracts a button from a jar, we see a flashback. The diegetic sounds in the flashback, including dialog have an echo which establishes that this is being played inside the professor’s mind. And hence, the empathetic sounds of the gang, happily drinking and dinning and chatting, appears to be anempathetic as they contrast the mood and tone of the professor’s situation. We clearly hear professor exhaling as he puts the button under the seat next to him and the vectorization successfully transitions to a point of synchronization of heavy single beats of most likely a metal bell. It gives the feeling of amplified heart beats of the professor as he sees the police cars have entered the junk yard, passing in front of his wide-open eyes. All the sounds of him getting out of the car, crouching and even crawling is suppressed under loud diegetic sound of police siren. Even a fast-paced empathetic music track is dominated by the police siren because the siren’s sound is what the professor is focused at.
In sum, the sound design contributes a major part which makes the audience stay with the professor throughout the scene. The perfect mixing of diegetic and non-diegetic sounds along with empathetic and anempathetic music clearly differentiates the past and the present.
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