Audio & Accessories News

Shhh…listen to the design!

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:36

Probably the least noticed aspect on any film, TV or commercial production is the sound design. This is the process of manipulating audio elements such as sound effects (SFX) and background atmospheres and then laying them to picture to enhance the mood of the piece. The last stage is mixing these tracks together with the dialogue and music for the final soundtrack.

Ideally the sound design on a production should create a synergy across all of the sound elements. The irony is that most times, if the sound design is done really well, the viewer doesn’t really notice it – such as in Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, where the eerie, minimal sound design enhances the cold, dark blue tones of the visuals.

A film where sound design really hits you in the face is the off the wall comedy, Hot Fuzz, where sound effects literally jump off the screen to punctuate every bit of visual action.

“The possibilities of manipulating sound are endless nowadays. From changing the pitch, length and speed of an audio clip, to making a voiceover recorded in studio sound like an announcement in a packed soccer stadium over the public address (PA) system,” says Adam Howard of Howard Music.

Based at MOI in Johannesburg, Howard, a music composer, has also done sound design and final mixing for numerous commercials as well as a TV series, Bike SATV.

“Final mix can be made up of many elements including searching for library music, voiceover recording, sound design, and the actual final mix of these elements,” says Howard.

“I recently final mixed a job for Saatchi & Saatchi. A lot of their jobs are for Africa and they adapt a generic television commercial (TVC) for different countries. They will supply me with a voice recorded in that country (in this case Uganda and Ethiopia) and I will try to lip sync as much as possible. But being in different languages, you sometimes have to sacrifice the lip sync.”

For another job Howard had to final mix ‘animatics’ for Ogilvy for a Castle Lager commercial. “This is where a commercial goes into research before the client actually shoots it. They will have a slightly animated basic storyboard with a voiceover describing what happens in the commercial. Heavy sound design is required for this and a few music options are presented. Feedback from the research groups is taken into consideration before they go into production.”

Howard uses Apple’s Logic Pro and has a digital library of sound effects, recording his own SFX if needed.

“It’s generally easy to replace recorded atmosphere with SFX. The only problem you can have (which is quite common) is the actual dialogue has been badly recorded. If it’s very bad, I will have to post-sync in studio, and when that is in Swahili, it can be challenging!”

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