Designing for Sound by Randy Thom

Read the essay before class: Designing A Movie For Sound (1999). This page pulls out the arguments we discuss and pairs each one with a clip. All quotes are Thom’s own words.

What is sound design?

The biggest myth about composing and sound designing is that they are about creating great sounds. Not true, or at least not true enough.

Thom’s target is the idea that a sound designer’s job starts after the film is shot. His alternative: design the film itself with sound in mind, so that sound can shape decisions in every other craft. He saves his answer to the title question for the last page, and so do we.

• Clip: Inception was written around a sound. “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” is the timing device inside the story, and Zimmer built the score out of the same track slowed down. Watch

Discussion: what would it mean for a sound to be “great” but useless to the film?

Thom’s three preconditions

The essay names three conditions a film must meet before sound can contribute much of anything:

1. Tell the story through the point of view of one or more characters.
2. Choose locations and design sets that encourage sound rather than rule it out.
3. Leave room in the dialogue. In his words: “If your intention is to pack your film with wall-to-wall clever dialog, maybe you should consider doing a play.”

Most of the great sound sequences in films are “pov” sequences.

• Clip: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly opens locked inside a character’s perception, with vision and hearing both damaged. Watch
• Clip: Saving Private Ryan’s Omaha Beach sequence hands the whole battle to one man’s hearing. The muffling after the explosion is a point of view, not an effect. Watch
• Clip: Black Swan lets us hear what the protagonist hears as her grip slips, so real and imagined sound stop being separable. Watch
• Clip: The Social Network’s opening scene shows the opposite budget. The dialogue never stops, so listen for the narrow gaps where sound still gets to work. Watch

Discussion: Thom warns against non-stop dialogue, but he praises Tarantino for alternating talky scenes with quiet ones. Is the Social Network opening a failure by his standard, or a deliberate trade?

Ways to invite the ear

Thom lists visual choices that make room for sound: long and short lenses, dutch angles, darkness at the edges of the frame, extreme close-ups and long shots, slow motion, and black and white. Every item on the list withholds picture information. He sums up the common thread himself:

They all are ways of withholding information.

Starving the eye will inevitably bring the ear, and therefore the imagination, more into play.

• Clip: The Conversation opens on Union Square through a telephoto lens. This is Thom’s own example. The flattened depth of field puts us in a subjective space, which lets the track carry sounds that have little to do with what is in the frame. Watch
• Clip: Raging Bull uses slow motion as dream space, another of Thom’s named examples. Watch
• Clip: Lawrence of Arabia’s long shots let us hear the emptiness of a landscape. Watch

Discussion: pick one clip we watched. Which withholding move is it using, and what does the sound fill in?

Characters need to listen

Characters need to have the opportunity to listen.

Thom argues that a film gains sound opportunities when its characters notice sound: a pause after the dialogue ends, a scene where someone hears something before seeing it, a place with a voice of its own.

• Clip: A Quiet Place opens on a family whose survival depends on hearing each other. Notice how much plot arrives through listening rather than through lines. Watch

Discussion: in your screening film, find one moment where a character listens. What does the audience learn there that no line of dialogue delivers?

Is film a visual medium?

My opinion is that film is definitely not a “visual medium.”

He closes with a list of sound’s talents: sound can suggest a mood, set a pace, indicate a place or period, clarify plot, define character, connect ideas, heighten or soften realism, mark time changes, smooth or emphasize transitions, describe an acoustic space, and startle or soothe an audience, usually several of these at once.

Discussion: do you agree with Thom, and did you agree before this week?

So what does a sound designer do?

Thom’s answer is a person, not a job description. Walter Murch and the others at American Zoetrope imagined someone who would work on a film from the script through the final mix, brainstorming with the writer and director in pre-production, protecting sound on the set, then building and coordinating the track in post.

On “THX-1138” and “The Conversation” Walter Murch was the Sound Designer in the fullest sense of the word.

Murch also cut picture on The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, which is what let him shape those films around sound. One of his habits: he spends part of his picture editing time with the sync sound turned off, so he cuts toward the track he imagines rather than the rough one he has. That leaves the pauses where sound can do something.

Thom’s verdict on the job title in 1999 is blunt, and it is worth asking whether it has changed:

The term sound designer has come to be associated simply with using specialized equipment to make “special” sound effects.

• Clip: Apocalypse Now’s opening. Thom points out that what people praise in this mix “began long before anybody got near a dubbing stage. In fact, it began with the script, and with Coppola’s inclination to give the characters in ‘Apocalypse’ the opportunity to listen to the world around them.” Watch

His last line widens the job to everyone in the room:

anybody who shapes sound, edits sound, or even considers sound when making a creative decision in another craft is, at least in a limited sense, designing sound for the movie, and designing the movie for sound.

Discussion: by that definition, who on a student crew is designing sound? Name the decisions in your own projects that were sound decisions without anyone calling them that.

Activity: scene analysis

1. Choose a scene from the clips above.
2. Identify the sound elements at work and note how they shape mood, pacing, and character.
3. Take notes while we watch: what emotions does the sound evoke, and how does it interact with the picture?
4. We compare notes as a class.

What’s changed since 1999

Source: Randy Thom, “Designing A Movie For Sound,” filmsound.org, 1999. All quotations are verbatim from the essay.