Designing a sound: How do you know when to stop?
Something I often asked myself as a young editor, and am often asked now, is how do you know when to stop? That is, when do you decide that your work is ‘good enough’ and its time to move on?
These days budgets and schedules are often appallingly low and short. This means that a great weight is placed on the editor to be able to manage their time super-efficiently. Knowing when to move on to the next effect so that they can all be addressed is a vital skill, one that is necessarily developed through gruelling experience. As the adage says, a poem is never completed, only abandoned. Meaning, every single piece of art ever created could be improved if the artist had just a bit more (ie infinite) time.
Now, you will have read plenty of pieces from sound designers explaining how they achieved perfection. Some of them get pretty close, but deep down they all know that with just another week, another day, another hour, they could have added just one more flourish to their work. All creatives and artists feel this way, it is what drives them. This necessarily creates a list of factors the designer must consider to know when they’re ‘done’. This creates a hierarchy of sorts:
• Coverage: this is the most basic level. To make sure that “something” is put on the effect; if someone notices, they will hear that the effect has got some kind of sound on it. AI has reached this level.
• Believability: Not only is there a sound on it, but you can believe that it would be true to the picture, depending on the amount of attention you give it. Most editors are capable of this, in any medium.
• Convincingness: A slight level up – the sound is convincing in that it starts to feel right for what it is, but also how it plays in the context. More detailed, exceeding expectations.
• Character: Far exceeds audience expectations, not only following the action, but adding value to it. There is an opportunity to increase what action is implied by embellishment. For example, the onscreen character idly presses a switch on a spaceship. Coverage means placing a ‘click’ sound. To make it believable, we put a beep-bloop as well, because we’re in space, and that is the established convention. To make it convincing, one might overlay something in line with the colour palette or established aesthetic of the show; is it serious or funny, functional or cosmetic? Being characterful would mean investigating what happens to the ship when the switch is flicked. Does it open a distant door that you can hear deep offscreen? Perhaps it slightly, subtly causes a change in the engine tone. Does it start something up or shut something down? What sonic material can add value without being distracting, stealing the focus, while remaining completely natural and believable? How much added value is too much for the scene to bear?
• Magic: this is what every serious editor strives for. The sound is so interesting and beautiful that it could not possibly be any other. It is the action, inseparably tied to it, emotionally, functionally and believably. It appropriates just enough of the audience’s attention for the scene. It knows when to steal focus and when to shut up. It supports the story and affects the audience exactly as much as needed, subliminally or overtly. It exceeds sonic expectations while at the same time maintaining credibility and ticking all functional and technical boxes. In many cases, it may make (even seasoned) audience members wonder how on earth they created that sound, while simultaneously utterly convincing them. I think this when I hear the voice of Kong, in Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Or R2D2’s voice: kids, and grown-up kids, have been imitating this iconic sound for half a century. Every sound a designer creates should strive for this, albeit to the level that is appropriate. (Sometimes a switch is just a switch, as boring and unassuming as it needs to be.)
Best of all, when every element of the film is working perfectly in harmony, the audience is not at all distracted by any technical questions, but ‘living’ the action.
This is why the art of sound design is so fascinating, because art is not a science. There are no exact answers. Every audience member can, and should, react differently. We’ve all had various amounts of experience with the world and with life.
So, to answer the question posed at the beginning of this article, when is it time to stop…?
