Vidocq
Film: 22 Mar 2002
By: Cedric Denooz
N/A
DVD
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Sound designers and self-described Kyma addicts Cedric Denooz and Christophe Colson created the voice of the Alchemist for Pitof's digital video film Vidocq. Set in nineteenth century Paris, the film tells the story of the final case of Eugene François Vidocq, fugitive-turned-police-spy with legendary crime-solving abilities. His last assignment was to solve the case of the Alchemist, a monster hidden by a mirror-mask whose victims lose their souls as they are murdered.

Discussion (Descriptions, reviews, discussion):

Pitof's conception of the Alchemist is not so much a real character as he is evil incarnate. He is a ghost with many voices and disguises. He can become anything from a sweet young girl to a terrifying beast. Over the course of the film, the Alchemist's voice starts out as the raspy voice of an old man and ends as a girl's whisper. To create the voice, Denooz and Colson started by recording a master track of a voice actor who specializes in "reverse talking," i.e., speaking while inhaling. Then they got two comediennes to dub their voices onto the master voice using ADR. The resulting voice tracks were then mixed in various ways and processed with Kyma.

This is the first film ever to have been shot using the Sony high definition digital camera and they spent one year in post-production.