By Justin Joseph Hall

One of the first things they teach you in an Intro to Production class is that bad sound is the fastest way a professional filmmaker can spot an amateur-made video. If you’re new to filmmaking it’s important to know the difference between sound design and sound mixing.  This is a first step to understanding how to create a good sound for your video.

Sound Design

Sound Design is the ambiance of the auditory space.  Let’s do an exercise together to help us learn.  Look around in the room you're in right now.  What do you see?  Say those things out loud.  After that close your eyes for one minute.  Listen to everything in the room.  What do you hear?  Say them out loud.  Be specific. Do you hear a computer fan?  Birds out the window, friends in the other room chatting? Is a train rolling by in the distance? Write down all of it.

A sound editor and foley artist create the feeling of the room. One way they do this is by recording each of the sounds you wrote down in the exercise we just did.  Other common sound effects include footsteps, clothes rustling, or even the sound of a refrigerator, radiator, or crickets chirping at night.

When we get to sound mixing we want to have a recording for each individual sound so you can adjust the loudness of each sound separately in the sound mix, which we’ll talk about in more detail later. 

Sound design is an amazing tool that many commercial entities and independent filmmakers don’t think about or utilize.  In a commercial setting, you may think sound design is an unnecessary excess.  However, a half a day’s work from a sound designer can bring up the production value of a video tenfold.  

One specific place where it really helps out is in animation because purely graphic animations don’t come with audio like interviews or captured video do.  Yet animation is common in commercial video products and changed completely when sound is added.

One example that is quick and easy to show are logo animations, like this one my company  created for PerformLine. Watch it with sound, and then mute the video and watch again. The sound adds energy to the logo and branding.  

Sound design encompasses a wide array of sound effects. Sound Designers adjust their effects to fit the aesthetic and world of the film. For example, in David Lynch's Eraserhead, sounds like water running in a bathtub, or the clanking of an old heater, are more menacing and noticeable than they are in everyday life. Anyone who’s seen The Matrix may remember the whooshing noise accompanying Neo’s slow-motion bullet-dodging. 

Both of these examples are louder than one would expect to hear in the real world (or see, in the case of The Matrix, but I digress), and that has to do with how the Sound Mixer worked with the sound design. So now that you are familiar with sound design, let’s learn about the next and final step in audio post-production: sound mixing.

Sound Mixing

A sound mix is the last step in finishing audio for a film.  Simply put, the sound mixer adjusts how loud or quiet each individual sound is to maximize the impact of the message of the final video. The three main categories are dialogue, sound effects, and music.  Also, it can be confusing, but Sound Mixers may also have the title Re-Recording Mixer.

In commercial videos, mixing interviews can make voices more pronounced, clear, and pleasant to listen to.  Colloquially, this process is also called “sound sweetening.”  This step is important for sound clarity as well as creating the ambiance for the film.  For example, it is very annoying to hear a video where the dialogue of an interviewee or a central character in a scene is overpowered by loud music or background characters. Don’t let your audience’s focus be pulled away from a story by bad sound mixing. 

It is also important to remember a sound mixer can only do so much.  Some of the sound problems cannot be fixed after recording.  If you’re recording an interview of a rock fan at a concert while the band is playing loudly it is often impossible to separate a person speaking from the loud background music.  It’s important to keep in mind that not all problems can be solved in the sound mix.  An accomplished Sound Mixer can adjust audio to improve it, but it’s important to record clear high-quality audio to obtain optimal results.

If you have any questions or would like more information go to our website www.fourwindfilms.com, or write to me directly at justin.joseph.hall@fourwindfilms.com.