short filmhong kong · 2020
Seven years in one city, cut to eight minutes and scored from nothing.
A personal film about Hong Kong, made over nearly two months. Every clip had its original audio stripped out and rebuilt from more than 250 separate sound effects.
City films are usually a showreel with music over the top. This one takes the harder route: the pictures are cut against a soundtrack built object by object, so a market slab, a tram gate and a ferry rope each have their own voice. It is the clearest demonstration on this site of what sound does to footage.
The challenge
Hong Kong is one of the most filmed cities in the world, and most of what gets filmed looks the same: skyline, neon, junk boat, a drone move across the harbour.
Seven years of living somewhere gives you the other version, which is markets, ridges, morning exercise and the bus. That version has no built-in drama to lean on.
How it was approached
Shoot across the whole city rather than the postcard, including four time-lapses kept from the first year here.
Then treat the audio as the place the drama actually lives. Strip every clip back to silence and rebuild it, so each shot is heard as well as seen.
the filmon youtube
Eight minutes fifty-six.
Shot across Hong Kong island, Kowloon and the New Territories.
the soundevery clip stripped and rebuilt
The city was recorded, then replaced.
Location audio carries wind, traffic and whoever happened to be standing nearby. Removing it and building each moment out of chosen sounds is slower, and it is why the film reads as composed rather than captured.
01
An alligator hiss
Placed under a sound the city makes that no microphone was pointed at.
02
A bible being picked up
To replicate a fish being moved on a wet-market slab.
03
Cereal poured into a bowl
For loose material tipping.
04
A jail door closing
For a gate shutting with real weight behind it.
05
A magazine dropping
For paper landing flat.
06
Sandpaper
For friction and drag.
07
A tiger growl
Under something mechanical that needed threat in it.
08
Pedestrians in Sweden
Used as the crowd wash under a Hong Kong pavement.
09
A pirate ship
For timber and rope under strain.
10
A washing machine
For a low rotating drone.
11
A go-kart steering wheel
For a hand movement with no sound of its own.
Two shots carry birds that were added, and one carries an aeroplane taking off that was never there. Location sound was recorded on an external iPhone microphone; the music is licensed, with one track from an independent composer.
frameswhat eight minutes covers
Not the postcard.
Markets, courts, ridges, the harbour and the bus. The skyline is in it, and it does not carry it.
What it was shot on
Cut in Final Cut Pro.
What it cost, off the invoice
- One motorcycle key lost
- One parking ticket
- One drone crashed, and a climb down a cliff to recover it
- Stopped by police once, and by security once
- A tent pitched on the edge of a cliff, twice
- Sunburnt more than once, and soaked more than once
the lawwhat this one proves
Sound is half the picture, and it is the half nobody budgets for.
The footage here is not rare. What holds it for eight minutes is that every shot was given something to be heard as. The same move works on a corporate film, and almost nobody makes it.
Converted from Hong Kong dollars at indicative rates. Work is quoted and billed in HKD.
Somewhere worth eight minutes of attention.
Nine questions, about ninety seconds. You get a price range and a date at the end of it.
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