The Art of Sound in Movies

O

OldCorpse

Rockin the Boat
What it says on the tin:

The Art of Sound in Movies

"It is a central principle of sound editing that people hear what they are conditioned to hear, not what they are actually hearing. The sound of rain in movies? Frying bacon. Car engines revving in a chase scene? It’s partly engines, but what gives it that visceral, gut-level grist is lion roars mixed in. To be excellent, a sound editor needs not just a sharp, trained ear, but also a gift for imagining what a sound could do, what someone else might hear."
 
Sort of true, but the use of animal sounds in everything has kind of died out. It was an over used trick mostly when digital and samplers first came in and you could manipulate the sounds to blend in. Not that it's not done today but it's a bit like "Avocado" as a color, it's a bit dated. And frying bacon, while sounding like rain is almost never used as a substitute. It's much more likely to go the other way since most editors have a lot of rain recordings but bacon not so much.

The bigger point of ignoring, to a certain extent, "reality" and going with the internal reality of your world in the film is a very good one.

The fundamental workflow is to break down the sound into elements you want to hear, get those and then build the sound you want.
 
BTW the article is better than the "sound bite" implies. I thought it would be another "formula" this is what Hollywood always does list of "tricks". If you take the quote in context which is really just to make the point that you need to build the sound that the story needs and that that sound is rarely the "real" sound, the rest of the article really describes pretty well the kind of work flow that goes on in a film where the director cares about sound and has a designer that wants to really develop the layers of the sound.
 
It's a weird craft.

To me it makes complete sense...but I have some serious personality issues.

I think it requires a very serious obsession.

First - it requires one to have an extensive second-nature familiarity with the entire audio spectrum, and that seems to only come from years of experience.
Second - it's radically opinion driven. It takes a sound engineer/designer with strong tastes and a willingness to impose them.

The only decent advice I've ever come up with for others who are doing full scene sound design is: "You have to constantly ask yourself 'what sounds would be occurring at this place?'" and then you ask yourself: "Now what more do I want to add to make it feel right to me?"
And lastly, you have to be right.
And what constitutes right? I have no idea - except to say that if lots of people really like it afterwards....then you were right.
 
there are certain tricks I use for certain desired outcomes, like if I want to make the audience really uncomfortable in a scene in a scary movie I'll do one thing, or if I want to make the "good guy's" car sound like a "good guy" I'll do something to it and I'll do something else to the "bad guy's" car. I'm not going to give away my trade secrets, but these are things you learn and pick up over time with experience, but it's not like every scene has all kinds of stuff like that going on. It depends on the scene, the project, and the overall feel.
 
DPStewart said:
It's a weird craft.

To me it makes complete sense...but I have some serious personality issues.

I think it requires a very serious obsession.

First - it requires one to have an extensive second-nature familiarity with the entire audio spectrum, and that seems to only come from years of experience.
Second - it's radically opinion driven. It takes a sound engineer/designer with strong tastes and a willingness to impose them.

The only decent advice I've ever come up with for others who are doing full scene sound design is: "You have to constantly ask yourself 'what sounds would be occurring at this place?'" and then you ask yourself: "Now what more do I want to add to make it feel right to me?"
And lastly, you have to be right.
And what constitutes right? I have no idea - except to say that if lots of people really like it afterwards....then you were right.
Click to expand...


Kind of, but on a film with a crew you are not alone making those decisions, and in all films you should be in close conversation with the director. So "right" is not that hard to decide on. Now that "right" that you the director and editors agree on may not be the "right" that the audience actually wants so...

It's really not that different from picture editing except that you are not generally making big story changes, you are filling out and enforcing the "world" that the director and picture editor are building. IF you are not part of that loop then it gets really difficult.

It does help to know sound but everyone knows some sound so once you switch your thinking to breaking down a sound into the parts you can get it becomes a lot easier. The biggest hurdle really is to get yourself to stop looking for "the sound" you want and start looking at the parts of the sound you want. Once you can do that the doors open up to doing things like sticking some animal sound in an engine or whatever because that is an element that you have thought would add a certain component to the "sound" you want to end up with.

It sounds harder than it is (once you start thinking in the right way). And it's also a lot more intuitive/ experimental than articles generally talk about. Articles like to latch on to either carefully thought out plans or "tricks" and neither happens all that often. Many times it's the happy accident or just hours of playing around with lots of stuf that doesn't do what you thought it would until something clicks. Or remembering that sound that didn't work for X and realizing it's just what you are looking for with Y.

It also helps a LOT to spend some time with folks who have gotten to that point and just being their indentured servant.
 
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