One of my college film professors used to begin each quarter’s class with a demonstration: He’d play the opening scene from Jaws, and the opening scene from Ordinary People, but with the soundtracks reversed. Set to John Williams’ Jaws score, Ordinary People’s scene-setting shots of upper-middle-class suburbia came off as ominous, rather than lyrical and elegiac. And set to Pachelbel’s Canon, Jaws’ scene of Chrissie Watkins getting eaten alive by a shark looked like water ballet. Williams’ music makes a huge difference in Jaws. But so does the sound of water lapping against a clanging buoy. In that first scene, all the noises—musical and atmospheric—create a sense of isolation well before the low pulse of strings creep in.

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And even prior to Chrissie diving into the ocean and becoming shark chow, she’s sitting around a bonfire with friends, enveloped by the sound of aimless conversation, acoustic guitar, and crackling firewood—which itself sets a tone, establishing what she’s about to leave behind forever. Drivers For Philips Flat Tv. Easyworship 2011 Full Version. All of this may seem like Filmmaking 101: mixing natural sound, effects, and music to set a mood and evoke a location.

But for a killer-animal movie, Jaws uses sound with remarkable sophistication and purpose. In fact, often in Jaws, the shark attacks are incidental to the movie’s portrait of life in a Northeastern tourist spot. The sound helps establish that reality. Consider the two scenes in the clip above. In the first, Amity Island police chief Martin Brody (played by Roy Scheider) types up a report about Chrissie’s death, and fills in the cause—“SHARK ATTACK”—as he hears it over the phone. The audience never hears the medical inspector say those words, and Brody never repeats them aloud.