The Museum of the Moving Image

On March 26th, 2014, my Hunter College Media class went on field trip to The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. First I would just like to say that I thought the museum was world-class in every consideration, and I highly recommend it to anybody who hasn't been. Now that that is out the way…
There were a variety of moving-image works, artifacts, and exhibitions that we saw; however, the one that interested me most was the Titanic sound exhibit, which gave an in depth look at the foley art and the sound mixing done on the blockbuster movie of the same name (by director James Cameron). Our tour guide informed us that the sound mixer of the movie kindly donated to the museum all the individual sound tracks from certain scenes of the movie. There were a total of about 5 different tracks (presented in Soundtrack Pro), and each one was dedicated to a particular sound element such as dialogue, sound effects, music etc. With this, quite amazingly, we were able to play around with the sound using different combinations of the tracks via the mute tool. We even tried playing a few tracks by themselves (with nothing else).
Through this experimentation with the sound tracks, I learned quite a few intriguing things about movie sound that I wasn't aware of before. First of all, I realized that many movies (including Titanic) completely reproduce every aspect of sound in post-production. This means that no sound recorded live on set reaches the final film; everything from dialogue to footsteps are recorded in the studio after the fact. Something else I realized, is that foley artists use very strange ways of getting the sounds that they desire. Our tour guide pointed out in the Titanic tracks, sounds ranging from elephants roaring to a can being squeezed. As it turned out, these sounds were more effective than the actual sounds of the action.
I must say that after analyzing the tracks, it was difficult for me to watch the scenes over the same way (when we played them back with full sound). I started to notice the over-exaggerations and the subtle inconsistencies with certain elements such as background/ambient sound.
Perhaps the most important thing I learned at the Museum of the Moving Image was how fast technology progressed, and over such a short amount of time. After all, the first moving camera was only invented about 100 years ago. This progression in technology has made the experience of moving images that much more entertaining and realistic. For example, sound quality alone (as appreciated in the Titanic exhibit) can be the difference between a flat image and an engrossing one.