When Lon Bender, cofounder of Soundelux, and colleague Victor Ennis teamed up to build the sonic portions of Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film Drive, a simple glance at the script might have led one to believe their work would focus mainly around the art of enhancing spectacular cinematic car chases. The movie, after all, offers the tale of a Hollywood stunt driver whose driving skills are all that separate him from a violent fate.

But the sound designers quickly realized that the film’s emotional success was not related to the car chases themselves; rather, they discovered that the emotional link between the action and the audience lay in the psychological nature of the piece, and that sound could be used subjectively to aid that agenda. What the protagonist (Ryan Gosling) was hearing, and sometimes not hearing, inside his vehicle as the pressure mounted told viewers about the character’s point of view during extended stretches without dialogue. During those stretches, Bender and Ennis gave personality to the vehicle itself—as a character that could interact sonically with the driver.

“We wanted to play with the audience’s perception of quiet and loudness and tie that into safety and risk,” Bender explains. “And so we took creative license and were subjective with all the sounds of his car, from tires rolling on cement to the creaks of the seats, and most importantly, the heart of the car, which was represented by the sound of the engine, both in terms of story points and the mental attitude of the driver.”¹

Thus, Bender and his team used “quiet and surprise” during the start of the film’s opening chase—a sequence that begins subtly. They made the vehicle “a fish among sharks,” Bender says, with police cars being the sharks. In those moments, the car’s engine is almost inaudible, and we hear only a quiet pulse from the musical score and tires rolling on cement. When a police helicopter spots the vehicle, all that changes, and—in Bender’s words—the engine suddenly “growls to life” as a tense chase ensues, with “an explosion of sound” between the dueling engines of the car and the helicopter.

The root lesson is simple: as with visuals, sound—no matter how spectacular, unique, or intense—has no value in a film if it does not advance the cause of the story. At the professional level, people like Bender design, shape, and supervise the execution of that sonic approach, often starting long before image capture begins and continuing until the soundtrack is married to a film’s visuals. Sound designers of that caliber will have a team of professionals in specific categories helping to execute that vision. As students you will likely be doing much, if not all, of this work yourself, so you will need to place yourself in the position of sound designer, fully understanding the purpose and nature of sound as a storytelling tool—that is, how good filmmakers use sound to complete the total story experience. You’ll discover that designing sound is sort of like solving a puzzle; it’s just that you first need to create the sound puzzle pieces before linking them together.

Sound is one of the most technically challenging disciplines. Luckily, you have the opportunity to learn about it at a time in history when the tools and options available to you eclipse what was available to your predecessors. Simultaneously, workflows and crew composition are rapidly changing; you will need to keep up with such changes as you move further into the sound world.

As filmmaking students, you need to grasp the time-honored principles and methods of designing and executing a compelling soundtrack. This means you should become as sonically attuned as you are visually attuned—you need to not only observe the real world but also listen to it. You need to comprehend sound-design fundamentals and the creative possibilities they offer, including the differences between natural sounds and manufactured sounds, and how each can be used in motion pictures. You should understand the tools and techniques available to record production sound, sound effects, dialogue, Foley, and so on, and know how to edit and mix those elements together.

You should also learn as much as you can about the acoustics, physics, and basic methodologies for engineering and measuring sound. As you explore both the technical foundation and creative uses of sound in this chapter, you’ll discover that the two go hand-in-hand. Put them together, and you will come to understand what sound can do for your project creatively—how to “knit it all together,” in the words of Lon Bender.