On music and sound design

As I mentioned in another post, there is a general misconception about what sound post people do. I always need to explain (cheerfully, if it's someone I like) that, no, I don't write the music for a film, I do the rest of the sound, and I'm always confronted with a smile and a blank stare. Then I explain how a movie is shot and that the only thing that needs to be recorded at that time is the actors' voices, and then we add everything else that isn't music.

It may sound like I'm being smug and belittling the vast majority of the people because they are ignorant of our trade, but I'm really not. After all, as a great teacher of mine used to say, "How would you know if nobody told you?" I don't know the first thing about business acquisitions or how the stock market works, so I understand how a professional broker would need to be patient and explain his livelihood to others. No, the problem I see with these misconceptions is that they happen right in our industry. That is one of the reasons this blog exists, and hopefully it will work as an educational tool for some that are (or plan to be) in the business of audio-visual entertainment.

The point on this post is that, to confuse things even more, composers and sound designers are starting to actually talk to each other and create alliances that benefit the soundtrack of a project. I did the sound design for a small-budget horror film called 'Shallow Ground', whose score was composed by my friend Steve London. We sat down even before the film was shot and made a plan to purposefully 'blur the line' between music and sound effects. He would use sound effects elements in his score and I would use musical elements in my sound design. So the end result was an aural tapestry that made the film sound bigger than what its budget suggested.

This method of working has the additional benefit of making the communication process between the director, the music department and the sound department much smoother, because everyone is talking to each other. It makes any potential "soundtrack crowding" problems come to the surface when there is time to address them, not at the final mix, when the only option is to sacrifice something. The problem is that this kind of open communication takes time out of an already crammed timeline, and it is complicated by the fact that it takes a lot of trust between the director, the supervising sound editor and the composer. To pull this off uneventfully, it takes a director that is very secure and really knows his stuff. I was lucky on 'Shallow Ground' in that the director was not only very technically adept, but also keen on experimenting with sound to make the film bigger and better. Others just like to keep things simple and not have to worry about supervising one more thing on their plate.

Even so, even if this 'blurring the line' between sound design and music is not what the film calls for, it is very important to maintain open communications between departments. I mixed a film with a crazy tight deadline that had a wonderful music score and great sound design action scenes, but I had to throw a lot of stuff overboard because there were too many elements fighting each other, and that could have been avoided by a few quick conversations between the sound team and the music team.