As you begin your sound design, you need to first swear an oath to two principles we have already discussed. First, every decision you make will be driven by a passionate need to advance the story’s point of view and connect emotionally with your audience above all else, and second, you will determine at every stage along the way the purpose of every sound you choose. Will it have a narrative purpose? a subliminal purpose? a grammatical purpose?

If you adhere to these basic guidelines, no matter what method or tools you use to plot your sonic agenda, or how many resources you have or don’t have, you will have a good chance of achieving your ultimate goal: making a good movie that connects with its audience.

In this section, we discuss how to plan the three prime elements of any motion picture soundtrack: dialogue, sound effects (basically any sonic elements, whether recorded live or manufactured on a stage or studio, outside of music or dialogue), and music. The reason for discussing, for design purposes, dialogue and sound effects in the same section is that they are the two elements you will be recording or capturing raw on-set or at a location out of the “real world,” even if you will be combining or manipulating them during postproduction. Music, on the other hand, is an element you will need to manufacture entirely out of your creative aesthetic; thus, we will discuss it separately.

Dialogue and Sound Effects

Your first task is to mark up your script in detail for sound opportunities. (See Action Steps: Annotate Your Script for Sound Opportunities, below.) Good sound design occurs in preproduction. The execution of the sound design happens during image cature and postproduction. At first glance, you may presume there is little to plan regarding dialogue—after all, the words are on the written page, and they are what they are. However, if you are also the director, or you have influence with the director, show initiative by evaluating dialogue from the point of view of the greater soundtrack. Are there lines that could be removed or changed to favor a particular sound effect or musical effect that could provide or enhance the same emotion or impact? Are there lines that could clash with a sound or background noise that the script also calls for? If so, point out such discrepancies and debate what needs to be changed—the words, sound effects, or both. Indeed, remember that entire films or extended sequences of films have been made without any dialogue at all, and yet they convey emotion and advance the story effectively. A classic modern example of this is the opening 20-minute sequence of the Pixar computer-animated film WALL-E (2008). Keep the old adage in mind: it’s better to show—or, in this case, evoke through sound—than simply tell. Many times the absence of an expected sound can also be a key story point, such as a “silent” scream.

Second, as it relates to both production dialogue and sound effects, think about acoustics (see here) and, to a degree, the physics of sound as you evaluate the script. Are there sounds called out that likely won’t work in the location or set being planned? Will special equipment or procedures be needed? Is it likely dialogue from those portions of the script will need to be rerecorded in postproduction? (See ADR, here.) Since the primary goal of recording dialogue is clarity, calculate if anything in the script might interfere with that, and if so, preplan a solution. Have a clear understanding of where you will be recording, and once locations are known, visit, study, and—yes—listen to them to better understand what opportunities or limitations they may offer.

Third, Walter Murch suggests examining the script from the point of view of transitions between scenes. He tries to think of sound in this regard as “a fabric, like tweed or silk,” over which he can run his sonic hands, so to speak, to “feel” how a change from one scene to another might need to transition sonically. “If the audience is ever aware of sound, it is at transition points,” Murch states. “That is where sounds start and stop. That is where the audience will appreciate sound more consciously than at other moments in the film.”³

Fourth, scour the script for opportunities to “discover new things,” in the words of Gary Rydstrom. The script offers up all sorts of “jazz” you can riff off for creatively interesting recording, editing, or mixing ideas that were not specifically called for in the story but that have the potential to enhance it.

Along those lines, think about the environments in which your scenes will play out. Background sounds and environmental noise need to be logical and believable, unless you have a particular story reason for exaggerating or eliminating them. Similarly, real things, like a car or an animal, need to sound exactly as they do in the real world for audiences to accept them as “real.” Even if not “believable,” per se, you can create your own reality with sound by using it to evoke a specific emotion that plays on audience expectations. In the movie Airplane! (1980), for example, filmmakers created a great sonic joke by always using the sound of propellers whenever we were supposed to hear what are obviously jet airplane engines.

Finally, be proactive and experiment. After organizing your plan, roam around, recording sounds you think could have relevance to some portion of your story or to a slice of the mix or a particular sound effect. A trip to the mall or to the beach may well evoke an idea about a particular sound. If you have a recording device, record it; if you don’t, come back and record it later. You never know when it might come in handy.

The Music Plan

There are so many ways to use music that filmmakers who are not careful can wind up overwhelming the movie. At the same time, music is a central component to storytelling. It does not, however, come with a lot of ready-made rules about how to employ it. The design of a musical track and the use of music to further your narrative is thus largely a gut process, which we expand on in Chapters 11 and 12. But for now, understand that there are different categories that music traditionally slots into in a movie.

Depending on your material and desires, you may need a musical score, which you or a colleague will write or license, or both. (See Business Smarts: Licensing Music, below.) Within that larger umbrella, you will possibly need an underscore—music the viewer realizes is added by the filmmaker to accompany the story in a thematic way. Or you may need source music, which is music that seems to be part of the environment within the story—coming from a radio or television, for instance. In such cases, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with a few principles, if not actual hard-core rules, of how to use motion picture music. Later in this chapter, we discuss how to record and edit these elements.

The first of these principles should be quite obvious: break down the script for musical cues and options, just as you do for the use of dialogue and effects. Try to get a sense of how you want to use music. If you are making a thriller or a horror movie, you will come to different conclusions than if you are making a romantic comedy. If you are making a period film, you will obviously be selecting music from the era you are portraying.

Also, be particularly careful about spotting where music should come in and go out of your story. In some ways, such choices can be as important as composing the music itself. Bringing music into a scene too early or ending it the wrong way can distract viewers from the narrative or cause them to miss important dialogue or effects.

Another principle to consider is whether the music you are contemplating “matches” your images emotionally. One way to figure this out is simply to listen to it first without your images playing along, and then with them. The tune may not necessarily feel related to your story topic when you hear it by itself, but when you hear it with the images on a big screen in front of you, your sensibility may be totally different. Indeed, when composing new music, professional composers typically write melodies to match or enhance the mood of specific scenes, and when the music is actually recorded, conductors usually watch the film being screened as they conduct musicians.

Also, think about the edit and mix early on in order to make sure music, dialogue, and effects won’t clash, forcing difficult decisions to be made later on. You need to remember that your big orchestral-swell moment will need to recede at some other moment. It’s better to give some thought to those moments early on rather than facing your big score off against your big sound effect and waiting to resolve the clash until the end of the process, in editing.

Another reminder: as you try to match music to images, pay attention to the grammatical role of sound. It is no accident that the term used for this is grammatical, because you essentially need to use music as grammar to move your story’s highs and lows along: as exclamation points, commas and pauses, definitive periods, quotation marks, and the like. This grammar is used to emphasize timing or have some kind of dramatic impact at a certain point. Most of us have watched the classic shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho, but try listening to it sometime. That scary scene is chock-full of composer Bernard Herrmann’s musical slashes designed to heighten fear and surprise.

You also need to consider a few practical matters in the context of your resources. In a professional environment, you would have a composer and music crew assisting you. However, as a student, you will have to make such decisions yourself. Therefore, be willing to make rational judgments. Are you capable of writing music yourself, or do you have access to someone who can? Can you find a way to hire a professional composer? Do you know how to search music in libraries or online? Will you have resources to license that music? Do you have backup options if you cannot?

While you sort things out, you will frequently use temp tracks—essentially, music you do not yet have official permission to use in the final product but which you use to help set a mood during the first stage of editing. In the professional world, temp tracks are quite common, although in recent years, with the advent of digital workflows and online licensing, final music commitments are often made earlier in the process.

Still, no matter what music you use, when you choose it, or how you acquire it, remember that music and filmmaking are both emotional arts. When you put them together successfully, you have made a major advance. Don’t shortchange the role and importance of music, but don’t overdo it either.