Where Sound Becomes Story
- maxchristopher6
- Mar 27
- 5 min read
By Julie Rostock
How do you approach sound design in your films to enhance the story or emotion, especially when working with limited resources?
Coming from a genre film background, I tend to think of sound in terms of presence or
absence. It’s easy to see how the sound design in a horror film indicates the presence or (purported) absence of a threat offscreen. I find it useful to view sound design for drama through this lens as well. If you can pin down a presence or absence, however intangible, that you want to feel in your scene, you’re one step closer to effective sound design. Surprisingly, I think absence is the better one to start with. A good first exercise in sound design is to try to portray grief, loss, or loneliness using neutral footage (whatever that means) as a base. It’s a great way to get thinking about the subconscious implications of a scene’s generic noise profile without having to wrangle flashier sound effects.
How do you collaborate with directors, editors, or composers to ensure sound supports the narrative rather than just filling space?
Most directors and editors say the same thing when they show a pre-sound-design cut: “Ignore the sound, it’s a mess”. When you’ve spent weeks hearing the same raw, choppy audio over and over, it’s hard to imagine the fine details of the foley work or scheme up auditory transitions. That’s why I like to start by handling major anomalies and smoothing out the sound a bit before I reconvene with a director to talk more specifically about their vision for the sound design. And always be prepared to iterate! It’s cool to be able to throw some weird stuff in a first version just to try it, and then pare down once you’ve gotten a round of feedback.
Working with a composer can be challenging because music and sound design are sometimes done simultaneously by different people. It’s possible for the sound designer and the composer to both build their own sonic arcs without considering one another, and then find themselves with a bloated project. Speaking with the composer early and staying informed is essential. Even just knowing “there will be music here, it will be upbeat” goes a long way.
What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in sound design for your projects, and how did you overcome it?
It can be easy to get stuck in a loop trying to make a film sound more “professional,” i.e., to make it sound like it was recorded on wildly more expensive equipment than it was. Sound quality can feel like an obvious marker of a project’s budget and, therefore, supposedly, its legitimacy, so there’s a real drive to denoise, denoise, denoise in hopes of projecting professionalism. In my experience, this is a great way to waste your time and ruin your sound. Audio can be noisy for any number of reasons, which, at the sound design stage, can only be fixed with a time machine. Learning to clean audio is definitely important, but once I started considering ways to mask or motivate the inevitable noise floor I get on the mics I have access to as a student, sound design started to feel less like running in circles. When you mix in an air conditioner or a droning TV to a scene instead of pushing the denoise function to its limit, you preserve the character of audio and even get to build it out some more. If you’re feeling frustrated, step away, take a walk, watch a movie, and notice how everything is built upon layers and layers of noise.
Can you share a moment when experimenting with unconventional sounds or techniques really transformed a scene?
I think viral audio, earworm songs, and things like that are really interesting. There’s a lot of auditory pattern-seeking that happens subconsciously, which I think is super relevant to media consumption in the internet era. When I was working on the script for my short Joan, I was kind of throwing a bunch of semi-random, associated-by-vibes-only elements into this morning routine scene, and I was really stuck on the suspended feeling of moving through a task while some random video plays on your phone over and over and over again. There’s a whole looping thing going on narratively in the film, which was nice to allude to, but ultimately the audio loop’s main purpose was creating a stiff, not-quite-real moment of suspension during a monologue. This allowed me to find a later moment to break that suspension, helping me line up emotional beats with narration via sound design.
For other students or indie filmmakers, what advice would you give about prioritizing sound design without a big budget?
In my opinion, the simplest way to improve your sound starting in pre-production is to treat sound as a creatively unified department like you would camera or PD. If you have a multi-person sound crew, consider establishing a department head for sound: someone who is responsible for thinking about sound continuity when no one else has time to, and who can think ahead of time about what sound will and won’t be needed in post. On small crews, it makes the most sense for this to be the person who will be handling the sound design. If you have multiple mixers or boom ops throughout your shoot, a department head can put everyone in contact and establish a sense of continuity in everyone’s goals on set. It’s very easy to feel detached in the sound department, because there are very few decisions to be made on set compared to the camera and lighting departments, and there’s not as much built-in connection within the department. I like being on a set where I know I will be handling sound design, because I can get a head start on recording ambient nonsense. Even if I’m not doing sound design, it’s nice to feel connected to and informed about the final product, which makes holding a boom pole feel like more than just physical labor. Instead of just filling sound recordist rolls on your call sheet, make an effort to creatively unify your sound department like you would your camera department.
Boom operation is often a last-choice job on student sets because it kind of feels like you’re just holding a boom pole - probably because on most student sets, there isn’t a pair of headphones for the boom op if the mixer is already using them. I, for one, just recently discovered that you can usually use the line out port on an audio recorder to plug in a second pair of headphones. I now have an agenda: HEADPHONES FOR BOOM OPS. How can boom operators be expected to monitor their positioning, or have any feedback on their work at all, without headphones? Especially on student sets where everyone is volunteering their time in hopes of gaining experience, getting to know people, and having fun, it’s important to connect your sound recordists with the impact that their work will have on the final product, even if that just means making sure they can hear the audio as they record it. Enthusiastic, informed sound recordists = better sound!
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