Sound Design Discussions

If sound design has been a concern from the inception of the film, this part of the process will be one of finalizing. Mostly film sound just evolves, so an overview discussion near the end of editing is a good way to ensure you are tackling the big picture. Although film sound is composed of dialogue, atmospheres, effects, and music, it is a mistake to think of them separately. How and why you intend using music, and what music rights may complicate your choice, also require careful discussion. For more information see Chapter 33, Using Music and Working with a Composer.

Decide the sound profile for the whole film before the editor goes to work reorganizing dialogue tracks and laying in missing sound effects. Assign each sequence a particular sound identity. This might be loud and noisy, mysterious, lyrical, building from quiet to a crescendo—all sorts of patterns and moods might apply. You should also agree on how to tackle known sound problems. This is a priority, as dialogue reconstruction—if it’s needed—is an expensive, specialized, and time-consuming business, and no film can survive having it done poorly (see “Postsynchronizing Dialogue (ADR)” on the following page).

Though documentary leads the way in narrative inventiveness, feature films use far more resources to develop their sound tracks, and documentarians can learn much from them. Walter Murch, the doyen of editors and sound designers, makes a practice of watching a film he is editing with the sound turned off, so he has to imagine what the sound might be. Other functions of sound, listed in Randy Thom’s “Designing a Movie for Sound,” (www.filmsound.org/articles/designing_for_sound.htm) are to:

• Indicate a historical period
• Indicate changes in time or geographical locale
• Connect otherwise unconnected ideas, characters, places, images, or moments
• Heighten ambiguity or diminish it
• Startle or soothe

It’s not the quantity or complexity of sound that makes a great sound track, but rather the psychological journey it leads you on. This is the art of psychoacoustics. Usually sound does this most effectively when you use simple and subjective sound rather than complex and naturalistic. By “subjective” I mean that you use sounds for their emotional or narrative significance—either to the characters or to the viewer—rather than the full, numbing panoply of sounds often present in contemporary locations.

Sound ClichÉs

Sound clichés result from loading up a movie with stereotypical sounds instead of responding creatively to the narrative needs of the movie. A cat seen walking across a kitchen does not call for a cat meow, unless said cat is visibly demanding its breakfast. This is a sound clich é. For a hilarious list of them, look up www.filmsound.org/cliche. Here all bicycles have bells; car tires always squeal when a car pulls away, turns, or stops; storms start instantaneously; wind always whistles; doors always squeak; and much, much more. The message? Less is more in sound, too.

Postsynchronizing Dialogue (ADR)

Postsynchronizing dialogue, very rare in documentary, is used to remedy poor dialogue tracks and means asking participants to become actors lip-syncing to what they said in an existing shot. You’ll see its full horrors in second-rate fiction filmmaking where it’s variously called dubbing, looping, or automatic dialogue replacement (ADR). Actors in a studio watch a screen or monitor and rehearse portions of their lines to picture until given the okay to record. Long dialogue exchanges must be broken into small increments. Voices invariably sound flat and dead in contrast with live location recordings, and this is not because they lack background presence, which can always be added, or even because sound perspective and location acoustics are missing. What kills ADR is the artificial situation. The poor actor is flying blind as he labors to reconstitute ten seconds of dialogue. He is completely in the hands of whoever is directing each few sentences. Actors hate it.

However good the whole, it invariably lowers the impression of actors’ performances so they hate ADR with a passion. Luckily, documentary audiences are tolerant of rough sound recording, which they understand is the trade-off for capturing reality. So never consider ADR unless the original is incomprehensible. For marginal recording, the usual documentary solution is to add subtitles.

Recreating Sound Effects in the Foley Studio

You can, however, fit sound effects to your film, whether shot on location or more recently in a Foley studio, and they will work fine. The Foley process was named after its intrepid inventor, one Jack Foley, who realized back in the 1940s that you could mime all the right sounds to picture if you had a sound studio equipped with a range of resources, materials, and props. A Foley studio has a variety of surfaces—concrete, heavy wood, light wood, carpet, linoleum, gravel, and so on. To this collection, Foley artists may add sand, paper, or cloth to modify footsteps so they suit what’s on the screen. My job in an appalling Jayne Mansfield comedy (The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, Raoul Walsh, 1959, United Kingdom) was to make horse footsteps with coconuts and steam engine noises with a modified motorcycle engine. It was great fun. We also shot all the footsteps, body movements, and horse harnesses jangling.

It takes some ingenuity to create the right sound for a particular shot. Baking powder under compression in a sturdy plastic bag, for instance, makes the right scrunching noise for footsteps in snow, and for a film about boxing you might have to experiment with punching a cabbage or thumping a sandbag to get a decent range of body blows. Paradoxically, many sounds must be contrived because the genuine article sounds phony. A door closing that sounds like someone kicking a cardboard box destroys the level of illusion on which all films depend. Making them sound authentic is an art.

Create sounds to fit a repetitive action such as knocking on a door, shoveling snow, or footsteps by recording their action a little slower. Then, on the computer, remove some frames before each impact’s attack. More complex sync effects (two people walking through a quadrangle) will have to be postsynced to picture, paying attention to the different surfaces that the feet pass over (grass, gravel, concrete, etc.).

You can see Foley work in Luigi Falorni and Byambasuren Davaa’s The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003, Germany), where they have recreated many spot effects. Some of the most important action with camels was shot with long lenses. The mike being distant meant sound was unusable. Films on nature subjects commonly contain a lot of sound recreation.

A grueling postsync session makes one understand two things: that location recordists who procure good original recordings are worth their weight in gold and that the best feature sound and editing crews are really top notch at their jobs. On a complex production with a big budget, the cost is fully justified. For the low-budget filmmaker, improvisation can cut costs. What matters is that sound effects are appropriate and that they are in sync with the action onscreen. Where and how you acquire them are not so important providing they feel authentic. You can find appropriate sound effects in sound libraries, but never assume from a printed list that an effect is usable until you’ve seen it against picture. Googling “sound effects library” will turn up many sources of sound libraries. Some even let you listen or download effects. Try Sound Ideas at www.sound-ideas.com/bbc.html.

One caution: Sound libraries sometimes have material shot long ago, and effects may come with a heavy ambience or system hiss. Loud or exotic sounds like helicopters, Bofors guns, and elephants rampaging through a Malaysian jungle are no problem. It’s nitty-gritty noises like footsteps on grass, door slams, or “small dog growling” that are hard to find in a useable version. At one time, only six different gunshots were in use throughout the film industry. I heard attempts at recording new ones. Authentic guns sounded like ruptured air hoses—not at all what you expect. And meeting expectation is the key to getting it right.

Equalization (EQ) and what the Sound Mix Can do

The culmination of the editing process is to mix the component sound tracks. Balancing tracks is not just a matter of adjusting levels; it also takes equalization adjustments. Each sound track contains a variety of frequencies, and each group of frequencies is adjustable by level relative to other groups. For instance, in a busy street we see two people talking, but their conversation is on the margin of intelligibility due to a heavy traffic background. Their voices are in the frequency range of 500 to 3000 Hz (hertz, or cycles per second), but most of the traffic is below 200 Hz. By “rolling off” (or attenuating) frequencies in the bass area you lower the volume of the band of frequencies below the speech range. Voices now emerge louder and clearer because the competition is weaker (Figure 15-1).

Equalization has other uses. A voice recorded from two mike positions doesn’t match when you cut the tracks together, but by tweaking the different bands of component frequencies they can perhaps become indistinguishable. You can also use EQ to make sound effects more comfortable on the ear, or more striking, and you can use it to prevent background sounds on one track from competing with the foreground on another, which might be speech or music. Sound and sound mixing deserve a very large book all to themselves, so what follows is a list of essentials along with some tips.

FIGURE 15-1 Representation of recorded voices in a heavy traffic atmosphere, first as recorded then using bass attenuation or “roll-off.”

You are ready to mix down tracks into one master track when you have:

• Finalized the content of your film
• Fitted music
• Split dialogue tracks, grouping them by equalization and level commonality:
  • A separate track for each mike position used in dialogue recording
  • Sometimes a different track for each speaker, depending on how much EQ is necessary for each mike position on each character
  • Filled in backgrounds (missing sections of background ambience, so there are no dead spaces or abrupt background changes)
• Recorded and laid narration (if there is any)
• Recorded and laid sound effects and mood-setting atmospheres
• Finalized sound time line contents

The mix procedure determines the following:

• Sound levels (say, between a dialogue foreground voice against a background of noisy factory sounds if, and only if, they are on separate tracks)
• Equalization for consistent quality
• Level changes (fade up, fade down, sound dissolves, and level adjustments to accommodate sound perspective and such new track elements as narration, music, or interior monologue)
• Sound processing (adding echo, reverberation, telephone effect, etc.)
• Dynamic range (a compressor squeezes the broad dynamic range of a movie into the narrow range favored in TV transmission; a limiter leaves the main range alone but limits peaks to a preset maximum)
• Perspective (to some degree, EQ and level manipulation can mimic perspective changes, thus helping create a sense of space and dimensionality through sound)
• Multichannel sound distribution (if you are developing a stereo track or 5.1 surround sound treatment, a sound specialist will send different elements to each sound channel to create a sense of horizontal spread and sound space)
• Noise reduction (Dolby and other noise-reduction systems help minimize any appreciable system hiss during quiet passages)

Sound Mix Preparation

Track elements appear below in the common hierarchy of importance, but that order may vary; under some circumstances, for instance, music might occupy the foreground and dialogue be purposely inaudible. As you cut and lay sound tracks, consider using the program’s audio waveform option (Figure 15-2). It displays sound modulations and saves you from cutting off the barely audible tail of a decaying sound or clipping the attack. Sound editing should be done at high volume, so you hear everything that’s there—or that isn’t there when it should be. Laying tracks with a digital sound editing program such as Pro Tools means you can edit with surgical precision, even within a syllable. The layout is visibly logical, and you can hear your work immediately.

Narration or Voice-Over

If you lay narration or interior monologue, you will need to fill gaps between narration sections with room tone so the track remains live, particularly during a quiet sequence. If you’re writing narration, see Chapter 32, Creating Narration.

Dialogue Tracks and the Problem of Inconsistencies

Digital editing systems can handle many tracks, but it is prudent to premix groups of tracks so you leave final control of essentials till last. First, you will have to carefully divide dialogue tracks. Because different camera positions occasion different mike positioning, a sequence’s dialogue tracks played “as is” will change in level and room acoustics from shot to shot. The result is ragged and distracting when your film calls for the seamless continuity familiar from feature films. Your painstaking, labor-intensive sound work will be as follows:

• Split the dialogue tracks; that is, lay them on separate tracks according to speaker and mike positioning. For instance:
  • In a scene shot from two angles and having two mike positions, all close shot sound goes on one track and all the medium shot sound goes on the other.
  • With four or five mike positions, expect to lay at least four or five tracks
  • Tracks may have to be subdivided according to character, especially if one is louder than the other. This is because they may require different EQ settings.
  • Determine EQ settings roughly during track laying, but leave final settings until the mix. Aim to make all voices consistent and to bring all tracks into acceptable compatibility. The viewer usually expects sound perspective to match the different camera distances.
• Clean up background tracks of extraneous noises, creaks, and mike handling sounds—anything that doesn’t overlap dialogue and can be removed. Any resulting gaps will sound like drop-out unless filled with the correct room tone.

FIGURE 15-2 Waveform option in Final Cut Pro^®, which allows easier sound editing by displaying frequency and amplitude (or volume) of a chosen track segment.

FIGURE 15-3 Graphic equalizer. When each slider is midway, all tracks play “flat” (as recorded). Improve a troublesome track by raising or lowering the volume of particular frequency bands. The resulting slider positions then draw out a graph of the equalizer’s settings. (Photo courtesy of Klark Teknik.)

Laying Music Tracks

Laying music is not difficult, but acquiring it legally may be (see Chapter 33, Using Music and Working with a Composer). To make library music conclude at a certain point, back-lay it from the known ending point, then fade it up at the starting point. If the music is only a little too long, you can commonly find repeated sections, so try cutting one out. Conversely, if it’s a little short, copy a section and repeat it.

Spot Sound Effects

Spot sound effects are those that sync to something on-screen, like a car door closing, a coin placed on a table, or someone picking up a house phone from its cradle. Important sound is often unavoidably poor in the location recording. A chapel interior, for instance, may have the heavy drone of trucks from outside, so you must replace atmospheres and footsteps. These must be synchronized and have the right perspective. You can hide an unavoidable background change by making the transition behind a commanding foreground effect, such as a doorbell ringing. Otherwise, bring a new background in or out by fading it up or down; don’t let it thump in and out as cuts because the ear registers a sudden sound change far more acutely than one that is gradual.

FIGURE 15-4 Diagram of sound attack and decay for a recording of three footsteps. Points A and B are ideal in and out cutting points. Points x and y are alternative in points.

Atmospheres and Background Sound

You lay atmospheres to create a mood. It might be morning birdsong over a valley or singing and tire irons jangling from within a garage. Some notes to remember:

• Obey screen logic by laying atmospheres to cover the entire sequence, not just a part of it.
• When a door opens during an interior scene, the exterior atmosphere (children’s playground, for instance) will rise for the duration that the door is open.
• When you create a sound dissolve, lay the requisite amounts to allow for the overlap.
• Listen for inequities hiding in the overlaps, such as the recordist quietly calling “Cut.”

Premixing

One sequence of a feature-length documentary might require 40 or more sound tracks, so you must premix tracks in groups. Do this in an order that leaves control over the most important elements until last. Since intelligibility means audible dialogue, keep control over the dialogue-to-background level till the last stage of mixing. Documentary sound may already be on the margin of intelligibility, and were you to premix dialogue and effects early, any added effects or music would uncontrollably augment and compete with that dialogue.

Tailoring

Many tracks, played as laid, enter and exit abruptly and leave an unpleasantly jagged impression on the listener. People respond less well to your subject matter, so you want to achieve a seamless effect whenever you are not deliberately disrupting attention. Cutting from a quiet to a noisy track, or vice versa, can be minimized by tailoring—that is, by building in a quick fade-up or fade-down so the louder track meets quieter on its own terms. The effect on-screen is still that of a cut, but not one that assaults the ear (Figure 15-5).

Comparative Levels: Err on the Side of Caution

Mix studios use first-rate speakers, but the resulting mix can be misleading, since most people will see your documentary on a domestic television set, which has a small, inexpensive speaker. The unlucky home viewer loses not only frequency and dynamic ranges but dynamic separation (that is, between loud and soft) as well. Foregrounds nicely separated from backgrounds in the mix become swamped on the home television. Be conservative, therefore, when you add a heavy background to a dialogue scene; keep foregrounds and backgrounds well separated. A mix suite will obligingly play your track through a television set, if you ask, so you can check what the home viewer will hear.

FIGURE 15-5 Abrupt sound cut tailored by quick fade of outgoing track so it matches the level of the incoming track.

Rehearse, then Record

When you mix in a studio, you as the director must approve each stage. You and your editor must know whether each sequence meets your expectations. To your requests, and according to what the editor has laid in the sound tracks, the mix engineer will offer alternatives from which to choose. Mixing is best accomplished one section at a time, building sequence by sequence from convenient stopping points. At the end, listen to the whole mix without stopping, just as the audience will. Usually there’s an anomaly or two to put right.

Safety Copies

A sound mix being a long and painstaking process, professionals immediately make backup copies on a durable medium to be stored in multiple buildings in case of loss or theft. Follow the same backup principle for picture; that is, keep media masters, safety copies, or film negatives and internegatives in different places so all trace of your work doesn’t vanish. An unlucky Chicago group suffered irreparable losses in a fire, and a friend in New Orleans found 10 years of work wiped out by Hurricane Katrina. More usually it’s thieves walking off with a computer. Expect the worst and you’re not always wrong.

Music and Effects Tracks

In case your film makes an international sale, make a transcript of the whole film. A foreign festival can then make a simultaneous translation for people to hear through headphones. Also make a music- and effects-only mix, which is often called an M & E track. This allows a foreign language crew to dub the speakers and mix the new voices in with the original atmosphere, effects, and music tracks.