Using offscreen sound to depict action would free the audience to imagine certain aspects of the story, allowing them to experience a more active, dynamic cinema, inclined towards imagination and play. However, the audiovisual techniques displaying the offscreen action need to be comprehensible. These techniques have to enable the audience to clearly recognise and orient the unfolding sonic elements not to become a confusing experience.

A lot of audio and visual techniques, but also useful cognitive, psychoacoustic, spectatorship or even perceptive theories are classified within the ressource. Listing notions outside the audiovisual production sphere was meant to enable the user to have a deeper insight to film spectatorship; in order to challenge his audience whenever possible, or conversely, to ease the viewing experience.

All techniques feature one or several related themes, a brief description and some characteristics that could be taken into account when employed in a film. It is to note that these characteristics have been deduced by the author own experience and are in no way definitive. It is only a subjective point of view that could hopefully provide a slightly better understanding of the potential viewing experience resulting from the use of a certain technique or combination of techniques. Also, cinema being an aesthetic form of expression, it does not allow to be categorical. Every characteristics can be argued and/or use conversely. Lastly, most of the characteristics have been written to consider using the offscreen space as a legitimate action space. Then, they are mostly guided towards the potential sonic content and resulting spectator’s experience.

Every techniques are linked to others that could be related in any way. It features links to opposite techniques, inductor techniques, induced techniques, etc. As per the characteristics, the links have been produced solely on the author’s experience and knowledge. They might not always be ideal examples but they were designed to facilitate and stimulate the user’s exploration of the classification.

These many links will enable and encourage the user to navigate freely between the techniques, exploring and discovering new concepts to serve as building blocks for later productions, although it has been put together in order to enable a more focused and practical use.

Through the use of the thematic lists, the user will be able to select a particular technique and trace a particular usage from there. For example, if you are already using a certain technique, you could navigate the classification in order to find another to combine with or its inducing techniques to find an alternative and to check its potential effects on the future spectators.

Another alternative would be to start with the example scenes provided and reverse-engineer their production methods, in order to further understand them, and/or ultimately, replicate or improve them in production.

The ressource is being updated regularly. If you note an potential bug or an improvement, please submit it by using the form within the suggestion / report page. This page is accessible throughout the site via the footer section.