Near Enough, but is it Good Enough?

After working for a couple of decades in this industry, I like to think I’m pretty quick at certain things. It’s impossible really, to do this job for so many years and not get fast at it, just like any skill.

However, the other day I was working on a relatively simple sound effect; a VW Kombi van starting up and pulling away, for a relatively inconsequential shot in a light comedy (i.e. it’s not Fast & Furious, cars aren’t the main event). We’ve got a decent library of kombi recordings, but nothing was quite selling it for me. Once I’d edited in the engine, then augmented it with suspension creaks, tyres, rattles, it still didn’t ‘feel’ right. I had to pull out every editing trick I know to get it to convince me. I looked up and noticed 90 minutes had gone by. 90 minutes on a single car start! If every effect took that long, I would never finish the movie.

My point is, who cares if the car sound isn’t exactly right? How can that affect the story? The answer is, of course, that film is cumulative in quality. Every little bit helps build the story, making it believable and entertaining. Given that a vehicle is often an extension of the character of the occupants (in this case a troupe of ragtag community actors on a mad dash to save their show), the kombi van had to help express this idea. It had to lurch, and cough, as if it was wasting their time when they needed to hurry. It had to feel like it was being rushed into service, against its will. It had to feel British and funny. It had to feel lovable and cute, as well as urgent and absurd. And of course, realistic. It had to fulfil the technical requirements of the shot, that had to gel with the shot’s point in the overall story, and it had to entertain. In short, it had to have character.

I could have saved myself the grief and just plonked on a generic kombi sound effect. No one would have noticed unless they were specifically looking for things to nitpick. Just like no one would notice if some rogue were to chip a little bit of paint off the corner Mona Lisa. But a little bit here, little bit there, eventually the whole painting just becomes ragged and shabby, tiresome to look at.

It’s these tiny details that cumulatively make an artwork. They are where the audience can sense the care and labour put into it. Any old AI can throw a car sound on a car shot. We’ll soon just be able to prompt it, if we can’t already (by time of writing). But to get it to have any feeling, that prompt will necessarily be as long as this article, and take just as much time to write. It will be full of so many details and variables that you may as well have just edited the sound yourself.

To end, here are a couple of examples of exquisite detail, the kind that I aspire to:

The arm muscle in this Michaelangelo sculpture, that can only be noticed with careful anatomical study; both on the part of the sculptor and the viewer.

The reveal of the camouflaged dinosaur in Jurassic World - an excellent synergy between VFX and cinematography; even now that I know it’s hiding there, I still can’t see it before the intended reveal. Gets me every time (at 1’38”).

The back-breaking sound at the end of this Simpsons clip. How did they get it to sound concretey, spiney, painful and funny AND to punctuate the sequence, all at once? Simple but perfect.