Let's say the director walks up to you, the production sound mixer, and  says  that he/she wants to brainstorm with you about ways to develop a  story idea using sound.  What would your reaction be?  Obviously you  would faint and have to be revived with smelling salts, but I'm talking  about after that, when you're fully conscious again. 

The cinematographer, production designer, and editor have analogous  conversations with the director all the time.  The composer sometimes  has similar discussions, but usually way too late for the music to  function as anything better than a nicely applied decoration to a fait  accompli. 
 

What I propose is that the way for a filmmaker to take advantage of  sound is not so much to hire a Sound Designer to fabricate sounds, but  rather to design the film with sound in mind.

 
A good first step is to try to become more aware of the ways sound can  function in a movie.  Most directors who like to think they appreciate  sound still have a pretty narrow idea of the potential for sound in  storytelling.  They basically think that it's useful  to have "good"  sound in order to enhance the visuals.  But that isn't collaboration,  folks!  It's essentially slavery.  And the product it yields is bound to  be less complex and interesting than it would be if sound could somehow  be set free to be an active player in the process.  Only when each craft  influences every other craft does the movie begin to take on a life of  it's own. 
 
 

A Thing Almost Alive

It is a commonly accepted myth that the time for film makers to think  seriously about sound is at the end of the film making process, when the  structure of the movie is already in place.  After all, how is the  composer to know what kind of music to write unless he/she can examine  at least a rough assembly of the final product?  For some films this  approach is adequate.  Rarely it works amazingly well.  But doesn't it  seem odd that in this supposedly collaborative medium, music and sound  effects rarely have the opportunity to exert any influence on the  non-sound crafts? 

A dramatic film which really works is, in some senses, almost alive, a  complex web of elements which are interconnected, almost like living  tissues, and which despite their complexity work together to present a  more-or-less coherent set of behaviors.  It doesn't make any sense to  set up a process in which the role of one craft, sound, is simply to  react, to follow, to be pre-empted from giving feedback to the system it  is a part of. 
 
 

The Basic Terrain, As It Is Now

Feature film directors tend to oscillate between two wildly different  states of consciousness about sound in their movies.  On one hand, they  tend to ignore any serious consideration of sound (including music)   throughout the planning, shooting, and early editing.  Then they  suddenly get a temporary dose of religion when they realize that there  are holes in the story, and bad edits to disguise. Now they develop  enormous and short-lived faith in the power and value of sound to make  their movie watchable.  Unfortunately it's usually way too late, and  after some vain attempts to stop a hemorrhage with a bandaid, the  director's head drops, and sound cynicism rules again until late in the  next project's post production.  

What follows is a list of some of the bleak realities faced by those of  us who work in film sound, and some suggestions for improving the  situation. 
 
 

Pre-Production

If a script has lots of references in it to specific sounds, we might be  tempted to jump to the conclusion that it is a sound-friendly script.   But this isn't necessarily the case.  The degree to which sound is  eventually able to participate in storytelling will be more determined  by the use of time, space, and point of view in the story than by how  often the script mentions actual sounds.  Most of the great sound  sequences in films are "pov" sequences.  The photography, the blocking  of actors, the production design, art direction, editing, and dialogue  have been set up such that we, the audience, are experiencing the action  more or less through the point of view of one, or more, of the  characters in the sequence.  Since what we see and hear is being  "filtered" through their consciousness what they hear can tell us an  enormous amount about who they are and what they are feeling.  Figuring  out how to use pov, as well as how to use acoustic space and time,  should begin with the writer.  Some writers naturally think in these  terms, most don't.  And it typicallhy isn't taught in film writing  courses.  Serious consideration of the way sound will be used in the  story is typically left up to the director.  Unfortunately, most  directors have only the vaguest notions of how to use sound because they  haven't been taught it either.  In virtually all film schools sound is  taught as if were simply a boring and tedious series of technical  operations, a necessary evil on the way to actually doing the good  stuff.  

Why not include composers and sound designers in pre-production  discussions about ways to approach storytelling? 
 
 

Production

On the set, virtually every aspect of the sound crew's work is dominated  by the needs of the camera crew.  The locations for shooting have been  chosen by the director, dp, and production designer long before anyone  concerned with sound has been hired. The sets are typically built with  little or no concern for, or even awareness of, the implications for  sound.  The lights buzz, the generator truck is parked way too close.   The floor or ground could easily be padded to dull the sound of  footsteps when feet aren't in the shot, but there isn't enough time. 

The shots are usually composed, blocked, and lit with very little effort  toward helping either the location sound crew or the post production  crew take advantage of the range of dramatic potential inherent in the  situation.  In nearly all cases, visual criteria determine which shots  will be printed and used.  Any moment not containing something visually  fascinating is quickly trimmed away. 

There is rarely any discussion, for example, of what should be heard  rather than seen.  If several of our characters are talking in a bar,  maybe one of them should be over in a dark corner.  We hear his voice,  but we don't see him.  He punctuates the few things he says with the  sound of a bottle he rolls back and forth on the table in front of him.   Finally he puts a note in the bottle and rolls it across the floor of  the dark bar.  It comes to a stop at the feet of the characters we see.  

This approach could be played for comedy, drama, or some of both as it  might have been in Once Upon A Time In The West.   Either way, sound is  making a contribution.  The use of sound will strongly influence the way  the scene is set up.  Unfortunately, sound isn't given this sort of  chance very often. 
 
 

Post Production

Finally, in post, sound cautiously creeps out of the closet and attempts  meekly to assert itself, usually in the form of a composer and a  supervising sound editor.  The composer is given four or five weeks to  produce seventy to ninety minutes of great music.  The supervising sound  editor is given ten to fifteen weeks to -- smooth out the production  dialog--spot, record, and edit ADR--and try to wedge a few specific  sound effects into sequences that were never designed to use them.   Meanwhile, the film is being continuously re-edited.  The editor and  director, desperately grasping for some way to improve what  they have,  are meticulously making adjustments, mostly consisting of a few frames,  which result in the music, sound effects, and dialog editing departments  having to spend a high percentage of the precious time they have left  trying to fix all the holes caused by new picture changes. 
 
 

Taking Sound Seriously

If your reaction to this is "So, what do you expect, isn't it a visual  medium?" there may be nothing I can say to change your mind.  My opinion  is that film is definitely not a "visual medium."   I think if you  closely look at and listen to a dozen or so of the movies you consider  to be great, you will realize how important a role sound plays in many  if not most of them.  It is even a little misleading to say "a role  sound plays" because in fact when a scene is really clicking, the visual  and aural elements are working together so well that it is nearly  impossible to distinguish them.   Film makers dream of creating those  moments. 

The suggestions I'm about to make obviously do not apply to all films.   There will never be a "formula" for making great movies or great movie  sound.  

So, paying more attention to sound, what does that mean?  Like everything else in film, it begins with the writer. 
 
 

Writing For Sound

Telling a film story, like telling any kind of story, is about creating  connections between characters, places, objects, experiences, and  ideas.  You try to invent a world which is complex and many layered,  like the real world.  But unlike most of real life (which tends to be  badly written and edited), in a good film a set of themes emerge which  embody a clearly identifiable line or arc, which is the story. 

It seems to me that one element of writing for movies stands above all  others in terms of making the eventual movie as "cinematic" as  possible:   Establishing point of view.  Nearly all of the great sound  sequences in movies have a strong element of pov.  The audience  experiences the action through its identification with characters.  The  writing needs to lay the ground work for setting up pov before the  actors, cameras, microphones, and editors come into play.  Each of these  can obviously enhance the element of pov, but the script should contain  the blueprint.  

Let's say we are writing a story about a guy who, as a boy, loved  visiting his father at the steel mill where he worked.  The boy grows up  and seems to be pretty happy with his life as a lawyer, far from the  mill.   But he has troubling, ambiguous nightmares that eventually lead  him to go back to the  town where he lived as a boy in an attempt to find the source of the bad  dreams.  

The description above doesn't say anything specific about the possible  use of sound in this story, but I have chosen basic story elements which  hold vast potential for sound exploitation.  First, it will be natural  to tell the story more-or-less through the pov of our central  character.  But that's not all.  

A steel mill gives us a huge palette for sound.  Most importantly, it is  a place which we can manipulate to produce a set of sounds which range  from banal to exciting to frightening to weird to comforting to ugly to  beautiful. The place can therefore become a character, with a range of  "emotions"  and  "moods."   And the sounds of the mill can resonate with a wide variety  of elements elsewhere in the story.  None of this good stuff is likely  to happen unless we write, shoot, and edit the story in a way that  allows it to happen. 

The element of dream in the story swings a door wide open to sound as a  collaborator.  In a dream sequence we as film makers have even more  latitude than usual to modulate sound to serve our story, and to make  connections between the sounds in the dream and the sounds in the world  for which the dream is supplying clues. 

Likewise, the "time border" between the "little boy" period and the  grown-up period offers us lots of opportunities to compare and contrast  the two worlds, and his perception of them.  Over a transition from one  period to the other, one or more sounds can go through a metamorphosis.   Maybe as our guy daydreams about his childhood, the rhythmic clank of a  metal shear in the mill changes into the click clack of the railroad car  taking him back to his home town. 

The imaginative use of time, space, and point of view, along with  efficient and sparse dialog in a screenplay will tend to determine the  degree to which sound can be a collaborator.  
 
 

Opening The Door For Sound, Efficient Dialog

Sadly, it is common for a director to come to me with a sequence  composed of unambiguous, unmysterious, and uninteresting shots of a  location like a steel mill, and then to tell me that this place has to  be made sinister and fascinating with sound effects.  As icing on the  cake, the sequence typically has wall-to-wall dialog which will make it  next to impossible to hear any of the sounds I desperately throw at the  canvas. 

In recent years there has been a trend, which may be in insidious  influence of bad television, toward non-stop dialog in films   The wise  old maxim that it's better to say it with action than words seems to  have been forgotten.  Quentin Tarantino has made some excellent films  which depend heavily on dialog, but he's incorporated scenes which use  dialog sparsely as well.  

There is a phenomenon in movie making that my friends and I sometimes  call the "100% theory."  Each department-head on a film, unless  otherwise instructed, tends to assume that it is 100% his or her job to  make the movie work.  The result is usually a logjam of uncoordinated  visual and aural product, each craft competing for attention, and often  adding up to little more than noise unless the director and editor do  their jobs extremely well.  

Dialogue is one of the areas where this inclination toward density is at  its worst. On top of production dialog, the trend is to add as much ADR  as can be wedged into a scene.  Eventually, all the space not occupied  by actual words is filled with grunts, groans, and breathing (supposedly  in an effort to "keep the character alive").  Finally the track is saved  (sometimes)  from being a self parody only by the fact that there is so  much other sound happening simultaneously that at least some of the  added dialog is masked.  If your intention is to pack your film with  wall-to-wall clever dialog, maybe you should consider doing a play  instead of a film. 

Characters need to have the opportunity to listen.  Each character in a  movie, especially each of the principal characters, is like a filter  through which the audience experiences the events of the story.  When a  character looks at an object, we the audience are looking at it,  more-or-less through his eyes.  The way he reacts to seeing the object  (or doesn't react) can give us vital information about who he is and how  he fits into this situation.  The same is true for hearing.  If there  are no moments in which our character is allowed to hear the world  around him, then the audience is deprived of one dimension of HIS life.  
 
 

Shooting for Sound,  Camera and Microphone as Collaborators Instead of Master and Slave

Sound effects can make a scene scary and interesting as hell, but they  usually need a little help from the visual end of things.  For example,  we may want to have a strange-sounding machine running off-camera during  a scene in order to add tension and atmosphere.   If there is at least a  brief, fairly close shot of some machine which could be making the  sound, it will help me immensely to establish the sound.  Over that shot  we can feature the sound, placing it firmly in the minds of the  audience.  Then we never have to  see it again, but every time the audience hears it, they will know what  it is (even if it is played very low under dialogue), and they will make  all the appropriate associations, including a sense of the geography of  the place. 

The contrast between a sound heard at a distance, and that same sound  heard close-up can be a very powerful element.  If our guy and an old  friend are walking toward the mill, and they hear, from several blocks  away, the sounds of the machines filling the neighborhood, there will be  a powerful contrast when they arrive at the mill gate.  

As a former production sound mixer, if a director had ever told me that  a scene was to be shot a few blocks away from the mill set in order to  establish how powerfully the sounds of the mill hit the surrounding  neighborhood, I probably would have gone straight into a coma after  kissing his feet.   Directors essentially never base their decisions  about where to shoot a scene on the need for sound to make a story  contribution.  Why not? 
 
 

Art Direction and Sound as Collaborators

Let's say we're writing a character for a movie we're making.  This guy  is out of money, angry, desperate.  We need, among other things, to  design the place where he lives.  Maybe it's a run-down apartment in the  middle of a big city.  The way that place looks will tell us (the  audience) enormous amounts about who the character is and how he is  feeling.  And if we take sound into account when we do the visual design  then we have the potential for hearing through his ears this terrible  place where he lives, which will tell us even more about him.  Maybe  water and sewage pipes are visible on the ceiling and walls.  If we see  the pipes it will do wonders for the sound designer's ability to create  the sounds of stuff running through and vibrating those pipes.  Without  seeing the pipes we can still put "pipe sounds" into the track, but it  will be much more difficult to communicate to the audience what those  sounds are.  One close-up of a pipe, accompanied by grotesque sewage  pipe sounds, is all we need to clearly tell the audience how grotesque  this place is.  After that, we only need to hear those sounds and  audience will make the connection to the pipes without even having to  show them. 

We need to design sets which have the visual elements to suggest the  sounds we want in our palette. 
 
 

Starving The Eye, The Usefulness Of Ambiguity

Viewers/listeners are pulled into a story mainly because they are led to  believe that there are interesting questions to be answered, and that  they, the audience, may possess certain insights useful in solving the  puzzle.  If this is true, then it follows that a crucial element of  storytelling is knowing what not to make immediately clear, and then  devising techniques that use the camera and microphone to seduce the  audience with just enough information to tease them into getting  involved.   It is as if our job is to hang tiny question marks in the  air surrounding each scene, or to place pieces of cake on the ground  that seem to lead somewhere, though not in a straight line. 
 

 

Let's assume we as film makers want to take sound seriously, and that  the first issues have already been addressed:

(1) The desire exists to tell the story more-or-less through the point  of  view of one or more of the characters. (2)  Locations have been chosen, and sets designed which don't  rule  out sound as a player, and in fact, encourage it. (3) There is not non-stop dialog.

 
 
 

Here are some ways to tease the eye, and thereby invite the ear to the  party:

The Beauty of Long Lenses and Short Lenses  There is something odd about looking through a very long lens or a very  short lens.  We see things in a way we don't ordinarily see them.   The  inference is often that we are looking through someone else's eyes.  The  way we use the shot will determine whether that inference is made  obvious to the audience, or kept subliminal.  Dutch Angles and Moving Cameras  The shot may be from floor level or ceiling level.  The frame may be  rotated a few degrees off vertical.  The camera may be on a track, or  just panning.  In any of these cases the effect will be to put the  audience in unfamiliar space.  The shot will no longer simply be  "depicting" the scene.  The shot becomes part of the scene.  The element  of unfamiliar space suddenly swings the door wide-open to sound.  Darkness Around the Edge Of the Frame  In many of the great film noir classics the frame was carefully composed  with areas of darkness.  Though we in the audience may not consciously  consider what inhabits those dark splotches, they nevertheless get the  point across that the truth, lurking somewhere just outside the frame is  too complex to let itself be photographed easily.  Don't forget that the  ears are the guardians of sleep.  They tell us what we need to know  about the darkness, and will gladly supply some clues about what's going  on.  Slow Motion  Raging Bull  and Taxi Driver  contain wonderful uses of slow motion.   Some of it is very subtle.  But it always seems to put us into a  dream-space, and tell us that something odd, and not very wholesome, is  happening.

 

What Do All Of These Visual Approaches Have In Common?

  
The conscious use of visual ambiguity is what they have in common.  They  all are ways of withholding information.  They muddy the waters a  little.  When done well, the result will be the following implication:   "Gee folks, if we could be more explicit about what is going on here we  sure would, but it is so damned mysterious that even we, the  storytellers, don't  fully understand how amazing it is.  Maybe you can  help us take it a little farther."  That message is the bait.  Dangle it  in front of an audience and they won't be able to resist going for it.   In the process of going for it they bring their imaginations and  experiences with them, making your story suddenly become their story.   Success. 

We, the film makers, are all sitting around a table in pre-production,  brainstorming about how to manufacture the most delectable bait  possible, and how to make it seem like it isn't bait at all.  (Aren't  the most interesting stories always told by guys who have to be begged  to tell them?)  We know that we want to sometimes use the camera to  withhold information, to tease, or to put it more bluntly:   to seduce.   The most compelling method of seduction is inevitably going to involve  sound as well.  
 

Ideally, the unconscious dialog in the minds of the audience should be  something like:   What I'm seeing isn't giving me enough information.  What I'm hearing  is ambiguous, too.  But the combination of the two seems to be pointing  in the direction of a vaguely familiar container into which I can pour  my experience and make something I never before thought possible.

 
 
 

Isn't it obvious that the microphone plays just as important a role in  setting up this performance as does the camera?

 
 
© Randy Thom 

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