The Acceptance

Kyma played such a strong role in the sound design for Yogesh Kubchandani’s directorial debut, The Acceptance, he gave it an ending credit. Can you solve the mysteries in this compelling, poetic film? http://www.3stonespictures.com

Following the initial screening of The Acceptance in New York City, director Yogesh Khubchandani, was barraged by questions when he took the stage. He politely declined to speak about the film, suggesting only that if people still had questions, they should watch the film again, adding “there are no symbols in the film; I just had one impression that could not be expressed in words, and so the film came out.” Can you solve its mysteries? (Order your own DVD copy of the film at http://www.3stonespictures.com)

Certain unforeseen events can almost literally befall us, unexpectedly and violently tearing into the web of our interconnections and relationships. In Yogesh Khubchandani’s new film, The Acceptance, one such event has disrupted the existence of Elli (compellingly played by Alicia Lobo) to its very core. Khubchandani’s poetic, spell-binding film uses images and sounds to create an urgent sense of mystery as he traces her inner journey from near despair to a calm acceptance. Khubchandani masterfully recreates a seamless interleaving of the inner imagination and outer events that constitute Elli’s flow of experience. Intense emotion is experienced as sudden silence and a sense of time slowing almost to stop as the character focuses full attention on the anger or fear or frustration and the rest of the world disappears for that stretched-out moment of time. Several threads weave themselves throughout the film: the restorative power of nature, thanking God for what we do NOT have, vegetarianism as identity, the relationships between mothers and daughters (the male characters rarely appear on screen).

Khubchandani also did the sound design for the film, using the sounds of birds, wind and water contrasted with the rattling drones of machines to underscore his themes. Like the images, the sound slips easily back and forth between realism and the logic of dreams. Kyma played such a large role in this transformation, it even gets a credit at the end of the film!

Disintegrating Podracers

The Sounds of Star Wars (http://www.chroniclebooks.com/soundsofstarwars/), a new book by JW Rinzler and Ben Burtt, describes how Kyma was used to create some of the iconic sounds in the Star Wars prequels.

The Sounds of Star Wars, co-authored by JW Rinzler and Ben Burtt, is no ordinary text; this book comes with its own built-in sound-playback system and headphone jack, so when you read about a sound, you can also hear it at the press of a button.

Not only does the book cover the classic Star Wars sounds, it also describes how Ben Burtt and Matt Wood used Kyma both to update some of those sounds as well as create new sounds for the prequels.  You can read (and hear), for example, how they used Kyma to generate Wat Tambor’s dialog or to do frequency following on Doppler shifts for podracer fly-bys (and the Kyma Chopper to create the sound of pieces flying off the podracers).

For more information and excerpts visit http://www.chroniclebooks.com/soundsofstarwars/