Sound Design

What is sound design?

Capturing later and mixing individual sounds to create one single soundtrack for the project.


Sound design occurs at all stages of a production, but is essentially a post production phase, the process is also called sound edit.

The sound Designer
The demand for increasingly complex sound-tracks created the need for sound editors to have creative input.

The Supervising sound editor position known as the sound designer, the first film credit went

sound layers
The sound designer assembles a number of layers or tracks of sounds which are then mixed together to form one whole.

on some productions there might be 50 tracks of sound, most commonly there is 5-20

Dialogue - all the recorded dialogue from the actual shoot. Voice-over would be on a seperate track.
Sync - the rest of the recorded sound from the shoot, I.e someone getting into a car or walking across a room.
ADR - Automatic Dialogue Replacement, This is all the dialogue re-recorded or dubbed after the shoot, nearly all Hollywood Films use ADR for the whole film.

FX - Sound effects or elements, recorded specifically or the production or more commonly they will come from a sound FX library.

Foley - the recreation of sounds using props or other items.

Atmos - sound elements that make up the atmosphere, jungle, city, countryside sounds.

Music - Diagetic (Within the scene) or non Diagetic( music playing over the scene)

the Mix - once the tracks have been compiled and then edited to the locked picture, the sound edit goes into its final phase the mix.

The sound designer along with a mixer and other key members of the production such as the director and producer mix edit the final cut with the tracks.

The sound edit phase the sound designer and his team if there is one will compile all the tracks, editing the various sounds to the picture, making creative decisions all the time.

on larger productions invidiula tracts are handled by one person or a team, so you will have a Fx, Dialogue editor and so on.

Unlike stereo which is two channels, Dolby 5.1 has five channels for surround sound.

The art of sound design

Is to add depth, feeling and emotion to the picture. its not about making something sound loud, its about making it feel right so the audience believe in what they are seeing.

A clock ticking in the room, a bird in the tree etc/

to create silence add sounds you wouldn't normally hear, fly, wind etc.


Production may spend 7 weeks shooting but sound design will probably spend double that.
Sound will undo a good film.

nothing can be arbitrary.