How To's | Technology

Sound Design, Part II

1 Jun , 2004  

Written by Chris Anderson | Posted by:

Learn the fundamentals of sound design in the conclusion of this series about sound design -- including how (and why) to fix it before the mix.

Sound design doesn’t end before mixing begins, and the idea that you can always "fix it the mix" is going to get you into trouble one day. Here are some of the steps to take before mixing to preserve the focus of the sound design — not to mention the sanity and well-being of everyone else involved.

Lots of Tracks Does Not a Mix Make

Let’s face it, creating an ear-catching mix for your film might well be one of the black arts of the film production process, and it is certainly beyond the scope of this article. It is the artistic vision of the film realized in equal parts from both the technical and the creative lobes of the brain. While creating a dynamic mix that supports the visual (the creative, fun part of the job description), a good mixer also needs to anticipate everything and anything that might be happening downstream from the mix — from the way the mix will be affected by the rooms it will be played in, to the media it’s recorded on, to how the film’s soundtrack components might affect any of that.

Mixing a film can be a daunting task under the best of circumstances, and the rule is that those on the sound crew have done their job well if the sound element of the film does not draw unwanted attention. On the surface, the sentiment sounds defeatist, but think about it — on the last great film you saw, what was the soundtrack doing to support and further the storytelling of the piece? We don’t generally remember great dialog edits or ambience track design because the sound designer will direct the attention of the viewer to the flashier moments they want you to remember, like the spaceship flying through the room.

Many picture editors trying to "cover" themselves when they get to the mix will take what we call a cooked-pasta approach to sound design. If enough elements get thrown at a scene, sound-wise, some of it’s bound to stick eventually, just like to old trick of throwing cooked pasta at a wall to see if it’s done — when it sticks, it’s time to eat. Sorry, but that steals momentum from what should be the fun part of the post-audio process by occupying everyone’s time with still more decision-making. Choices are always good, but random acts of audio just become a time-consuming distraction.

It can be tough, but keep your focus and take the time to make sure your tracks work together. Does the ambience track work with everything, or is it danger of being obtrusive? Do the sound effects work within and around critical dialog and/or music cues, or are they in danger of obscuring something crucial? Does everything sound like it’s coming from the proper place, spatially, or do those sounds need to be distanced? For example, your dialog from a close mic just doesn’t seem to be emanating from the gymnasium where the scene is set, or the dialog you replaced just doesn’t seem to sit properly in the scene. Flag these as potential trouble spots for the mixer, and a little extra time can be spent on them at the outset. Otherwise, it’ll just be unwanted little landmines for the mixer to uncover later on.

A Black Art?

Mixing is along the lines of what color correction is for film — there are technical guidelines that need to be adhered to, but there can be a lot of latitude creatively within those requirements. Color temperature, contrast, saturation, and more can be manipulated by a skilled colorist. A mixer is doing the same thing, only with multiple dimensions available, because where the colorist has a 2-dimensional film print to work with, the mixer’s palette can be dozens of tracks deep.

While it takes an experienced pro to make a mix happen quickly, there are several things you can do to make the most of the mix time you have. Just like every other part of the film production process, post-production sound centers around managing your resources well, so the more you can do now, the more time you can spend making really important decisions later on.

Keep it Simple

In a film mix, we strive to distill all those individual tracks — whether it’s a dozen or several dozen — down to concise mix. Simple, right? But before this happens, a film mixer will narrow things down to a final three or four tracks or groups of tracks — dialog, sound effects, music and ambience. How we get there is the whole trick to the process, but it might help to remember that film mixing is the process of funneling and narrowing down your options in the course of the mix. Simply put, we’re managing creative decisions here. A good first step is segregating your sounds by type — all the dialog should be dedicated to same track or group of tracks, and the same goes for all the categories. This not only streamlines the process later on, but prevents lots of mixing gymnastics later on.

We’ve all seen pictures of those Hollywood-style mixing stages with a mixing console the size of an aircraft carrier. It’s important to note, however, that even in those situations the mixing is being handled in small, manageable chunks, and not just by one person. There are usually at least three mixers running that monster, and they’re each working on those original groups of sounds — there’s a mixer for the dialog tracks, one for the sound effects and one for the music tracks. I know what you’re thinking right now — that there’s no way you’re going to get close to that sort of treatment and organization with your home setup or even a professional studio outside of Hollywood. Well, you might be wrong about that — that’s a little bit of management that’s been around since the first days of film.

Keep it Simple, Part II

Mixing is usually broken out by tasks as a sort of funneling process. First and foremost, the dialog tracks are combined and mixed together in a process called submixing, or in Hollywood, pre-dubbing. In the real world, we call it making life easier. The mixer is simply executing a series of mini-mixes before going to the final big mix, which — if everything is done right — will go quickly and easily.

When building your tracks, set yourself up with a quiet space and a nice pair of speakers that you can trust. There might be an investment to be made here, but it is usually far less than you might think — just stay away from those little self-powered jobs that are sold next to the desktop systems at the local computer superstore. They are inaccurate, at best, and get you into trouble later on when you discover there was a hum running through your dialog track, for example. Look for a good-quality, name-brand bookshelf-type speaker here, and make the time to get familiar with it. Watch some of your favorite films with them to get familiar with how the pros do it and what their mixes sound like on these speakers. Listen to a variety of films at a variety of listening levels, giving yourself a reference point for your own material.

Once you get to the final mix, your mixer will likely drive you crazy — it can be a lot like watching paint dry while he or she gets familiar with your tracks and starts some of the initial prep for the mix. A mixer will typically start out at a reasonable listening level, making sure things sound good. As a self-check, they will turn the overall listening level to a very low setting, sometimes just barely audible. This is the place to be when mixing critical sections, because you’ve reduced your overall dynamic window to a place where the voice information needs to be on top of everything else, or it simply won’t be heard when you add all the other elements into it. The pre-dubbing continues in this fashion through the sound effects, music and ambient tracks.

Once the pre-dubs are done, we’re left with anywhere from three to perhaps 10 tracks of material that should be working well with each other at this point. Remember, the pre-dubbing process is a way of making mix decisions in smaller, more manageable steps, and making the maximum use of track-building facilities. While many workstations allow us to work with sometimes dozens of tracks, virtual or otherwise, it can still get unwieldy fast, so anything to expedite the process is going to keep the mixing crew happy. Or as one producer put it, "just because we have all these great choices now doesn’t mean you won’t eventually have to make a decision!"

Visualizing Sound

In narrative filmmaking, dialog is typically the most important thing to hear in the final mix, so the mix will build off of that — everything else sound-wise should be subordinate to the dialog track. From there, an assessment of the film’s dynamic picture helps us choose our moments for bigger sound, whether it’s music, sound effects or a shouting match onscreen.

Next time out, we’ll talk about acoustics and sound theory and how they affect what you can do in sound design.