Good Night Oppy And Other Films About Sound Recording
There are films in which sound recording is the backbone of the story. It would seem strange, but, in the right story, it can be an important narrative device. For instance, The Outfit, in which the mafia tailor records a cassette with sensitive information for the FBI. Another good example is Soundtracker, the story of a man obsessed with recording the sound of silence, who accidentally records a clap in a place where he didn’t expect it. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Red is also a good example of what happens when someone records people’s phone conversations and discovers things they would rather not know. Thus, there are dozens of examples (there are 66 only on this site), such as the one we are going to explore today — Good Night Oppy. What sounds do we expect a lone robot on Mars to record? This is one of the questions raised by this wonderful documentary:
The film tells the story of the life of NASA’s curious robot named Opportunity, the Mars Exploration Rover, more commonly known as Oppy. This endearing robot was created by a large team of NASA scientists. When they sent Oppy to Mars, they thought it would only survive for ninety days — three months. However, Oppy toured Mars for fifteen years! In this film, sound designer Mark Mangini delves into the challenge of composing a soundscape for this documentary that was a complete departure from that of Dune. Although he pointed out that the process of creating the surface of a fictional planet was not far removed from the process of creating a realistic soundscape of the red planet, Mangini outlined a series of creative limits within which he deployed all his creativity. The main problem to be solved here, according to him, was how to be creative under different creation rules. It is one thing to imagine a fictional planet, and quite another to work on a real planet that, in fact, we humans are only just getting to know. Even though Mangini did invent some sounds, the main challenge was to create a realistic and immersive soundscape with real materials.
This documentary explores the Spirit and Opportunity rovers from construction to their initial missions. News footage and interviews normally highlight the human scientists and engineers who created and operated those rovers but the film focuses on something else: the Martian landscape and the robotic missions searching for signs of past life, especially the presence of water. This task meant a great effort in visual fidelity to capture the complex design of such robots, which, in turn, required a clear and realistic sound design that would give the audience a fairly complete space experience.
The sounds seem unreal, and yet the information gathered by NASA was an important source of inspiration for the creative work. The sound waves on Mars travel at a different speed than on Earth, and yet, they are there. How to work with that? There is wind on Mars, and, in fact, the Perseverance rover has managed to record and send a ten-second fragment of this meteorological phenomenon. So, how could Mangini use it? Well, thanks to this small fragment, it was possible to elaborate an intense sound for the entire atmosphere of the documentary. This is a work to be seen and heard in a movie theater, or at least with excellent sound since it allows you to travel millions of miles away from Earth without leaving your chair.
In a job like this, you need to be recursive. Mangini had the opportunity to visit NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This allowed him to record the sound produced by the rover parts (and that’s actually an extensive set of them). The sounds the viewer hears in the film are real, it’s just that the audience doesn’t know under what circumstances they were recorded.
As Mangini points out in this article, a key issue was the organization of the robots’ sound palettes themselves. As it’s mentioned, one of the main emphases of the documentary was not only to call the rovers by name but to make them protagonists; to bring out the personality that NASA scientists attribute to them. Oppy’s voice, Mangini says, was composed of the sounds produced by the computer disk drive. He took that series of sounds and modulated them with his own voice to anthropomorphize them. What does a robot sound like when it wants to establish communication? That was the basic premise.
So these are the kind of skills needed for sound design: knowing how to shape the available materials, and then turning them into an aesthetic experience charged with emotions, sensations, and questions.
If you want to achieve something similar for your audiovisual project and need the advice of sound design experts, don’t hesitate to contact Enhanced Media Sound Studio. We will be happy to help you take your production to the next level.
