The Art of Sound

Hi everyone, I'll keep this quick. While Cole, John, and I have lots to say about film making and the respective parts that we play in that process, we know that we are incredibly lucky to be surrounded by many talented artists, each an essential piece of an amazing jigsaw puzzle. From time to time, we'll introduce you to some of them and have them share some of their experiences working on Separation Anxiety. That brings us to our first guest blogger. I'm pleased to introduce you to Jordan Fehr.

Hello all, Jordan Fehr here. I am the Sound Designer working with Glass City Films on Separation Anxiety and I have been asked to say a bit about what I do here on the production blog.

First of all, Sound Design is both a technical and creative field, and a Sound Designer can be responsible for everything except the compositional aspects of the film's sound. The term is also now used in Video Games, Theatre, and other multimedia projects.

Anyone who has worked in film or watching some special features on a DVD with unfinished scenes knows that with our current sensibilities, that raw footage is almost unwatchable. It seems boring, flat, and fraught with mistakes. More than 50 percent of this is usually the audio. We are so used to polished film sound, where every little sound in the scene is closely controlled, that when we hear the sound from just the set, it seems cheap and bad. That is where Post Production Audio comes in. We receive the film after it has been edited, and both edit the production audio from the set, and add lots of new sound to sweeten what is there but also add sounds that SHOULD be there, but are not. Backgrounds are put in to establish time and place, Foley is added to sweeten human movement and interaction with objects, and SFX and SPFX are added for other things that make noises, or to enhance the film in some other way. On a large Hollywood movie, all the various roles that I fulfilled when working on this trailer would be done by an entire team of people.

Doing Sound Design for a trailer is a bit different than working on an entire film, because there is a lot more music and dialog, with usually no space in between, and the point is to hit them hard and fast and make your audience feel something without getting the whole picture. The trailer for Separation Anxiety came to me with pretty good production sound, and some great local music. I spent more time on the dialog and music edits than I did on anything else, because there were not a ton of SFX and Foley that needed to be done in the trailer. Dialog is the most important thing, and the music provides that much needed emotional push so those were the focus. SFX were added on scene transitions, when text comes up on screen, or to enhance something in a subtle way, like the fireworks or Bai and Jess laughing.

If I did my job right, you probably didn't notice the audio all that much, but you felt something from the trailer, and you believed that these scenes actually took place, instead of thinking about a movie being made. If you are curious about Sound Design, there have been some great DVD features about it in the past 5-8 years. I recommend the featurettes on Wall-E, King Kong and the Lord of the Rings Special Editions.