Educational Articles

Designing A Movie For Sound
by
© Randy Thom
earcirc@dnai.com
(updated 3/15/99)

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

What is Sound Design? 

You may assume that it’s about fabricating neat sound effects. But that 
doesn’t describe very accurately what Ben Burtt and Walter Murch, who 
invented the term, did on "Star Wars" and "Apocalypse Now" 
respectively. On those films they found themselves working with 
Directors who were not just looking for powerful sound effects to attach 
to a structure that was already in place. By experimenting with sound, 
playing with sound (and not just sound effects, but music and dialog as 
well) all through production and post production what Francis Coppola, 
Walter Murch, George Lucas, and Ben Burtt found is that sound began to 
shape the picture sometimes as much as the picture shaped the sound. The 
result was very different from anything we had heard before. The films 
are legends, and their soundtracks changed forever the way we think 
about film sound. 

 What passes for "great sound" in films today is too often merely loud 
sound. High fidelity recordings of gunshots and explosions, and well 
fabricated alien creature vocalizations don't constitute great sound
design. A well-orchestrated and recorded piece of musical score has 
minimal value if it hasn’t been integrated into the film as a whole. 
Giving the actors plenty of things to say in every scene isn’t necessarily 
doing them, their characters, or the movie a favor. Sound, musical and 
otherwise, has value when it is part of a continuum, when it changes over 
time, has dynamics, and resonates with other sound and with other sensory 
experiences. 

 What I propose is that the way for a filmmaker to take advantage of 
sound is not simply to make it possible to record good sound on the set 
(though God knows that would be a triumph in itself), or simply to hire a 
talented sound designer/composer to fabricate sounds, but rather to design 
the film with sound in mind, to allow sound’s contributions to influence 
creative decisions in the other crafts. Films as different from "Star Wars" as 
"Citizen Kane," "Raging Bull," "Eraserhead," "The Elephant Man," "Never Cry 
Wolf" and "Once Upon A Time In The West" were thoroughly "sound designed," 
though no sound designer was credited on most of them. 

 Does every film want, or need, to be like Star Wars or Apocalypse Now? 
Absolutely not. But lots of films could benefit from those models. 
Sidney Lumet said recently in an interview that he had been amazed at 
what Francis Coppola and Walter Murch had been able to accomplish in the 
mix of "Apocalypse Now." Well, what was great about that 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. 

 Many directors who like to think they appreciate sound still have a 
pretty narrow idea of the potential for sound in storytelling. The 
generally accepted view is that it’s useful to have "good" sound in 
order to enhance the visuals and root the images in a kind of temporal 
reality. But that isn’t collaboration, it’s slavery. And the product it 
yields is bound to be less complex and interesting than it would be if 
sound could somehow be set free to be an active player in the 
process. Only when each craft influences every other craft does the 
movie begin to take on a life of it’s own.

Walter Murch has enormous talent for manipulating sound, but what made
the tracks in films like The Conversation and Apocalypse Now great was 
probably more his ability to manipulate the film, the story, and the images in
ways that allowed sound to be a collaborator, not just something pasted-on. 

A Thing Almost Alive 

 It is a common myth that the time for film makers to think seriously 
about sound is at the end of the film making process, when the structure 
of the movie is already in place. After all, how is the composer to know 
what kind of music to write unless he/she can examine at least a rough 
assembly of the final product? For some films this approach is 
adequate. Rarely, it works amazingly well. But doesn’t it seem odd that 
in this supposedly collaborative medium, music and sound effects rarely 
have the opportunity to exert any influence on the non-sound crafts? How 
is the Director supposed to know how to make the film without having a 
plan for using music? 

 A dramatic film which really works is, in some senses, almost alive, a 
complex web of elements which are interconnected, almost like living 
tissues, and which despite their complexity work together to present a 
more-or-less coherent set of behaviors. It doesn’t make any sense to set 
up a process in which the role of one craft, sound, is simply to react, 
to follow, to be pre-empted from giving feedback to the system it is a 
part of. 

The Basic Terrain, As It Is Now 

 Many feature film directors tend to oscillate between two wildly 
different states of consciousness about sound in their movies. On one 
hand, they tend to ignore any serious consideration of sound (including 
music) throughout the planning, shooting, and early editing. Then they 
suddenly get a temporary dose of religion when they realize that there 
are holes in the story, weak scenes, and bad edits to disguise. Now they 
develop enormous and short-lived faith in the power and value of sound 
to make their movie watchable. Unfortunately it’s usually way too late, 
and after some vain attempts to stop a hemorrhage with a bandaid, the 
Director’s head drops, and sound cynicism rules again until late in the 
next project’s post production. 

 What follows is a list of some of the bleak realities faced by those of 
us who work in film sound, and some suggestions for improving the 
situation. 

Pre-Production 

 If a script has lots of references in it to specific sounds, we might 
be tempted to jump to the conclusion that it is a sound-friendly script. 
But this isn’t necessarily the case. The degree to which sound is 
eventually able to participate in storytelling will be more determined 
by the use of time, space, and point of view in the story than by how 
often the script mentions actual sounds. Most of the great sound 
sequences in films are "pov" sequences. The photography, the blocking of 
actors, the production design, art direction, editing, and dialogue have 
been set up such that we, the audience, are experiencing the action more 
or less through the point of view of one, or more, of the characters in 
the sequence. Since what we see and hear is being filtered through their 
consciousness, what they hear can give us lots of information about who 
they are and what they are feeling. Figuring out how to use pov, as well 
as how to use acoustic space and the element of time, should begin with 
the writer. Some writers naturally think in these terms, most don’t. And 
it is almost never taught in film writing courses. 

 Serious consideration of the way sound will be used in the story is 
typically left up to the director. Unfortunately, most directors have 
only the vaguest notions of how to use sound because they haven’t been 
taught it either. In virtually all film schools sound is taught as if it 
were simply a tedious and mystifying series of technical operations, a 
necessary evil on the way to doing the fun stuff. 

 Production 

 On the set, virtually every aspect of the sound crew’s work is 
dominated by the needs of the camera crew. The locations for shooting 
have been chosen by the Director, DP, and Production Designer long 
before anyone concerned with sound has been hired. The sets are 
typically built with little or no concern for, or even awareness of, the 
implications for sound. The lights buzz, the generator truck is parked 
way too close. The floor or ground could easily be padded to dull the 
sound of footsteps when feet aren’t in the shot, but there isn’t enough 
time. The shots are usually composed, blocked, and lit with very little 
effort toward helping either the location sound crew or the post 
production crew take advantage of the range of dramatic potential 
inherent in the situation. In nearly all cases, visual criteria 
determine which shots will be printed and used. Any moment not 
containing something visually fascinating is quickly trimmed away. 

 There is rarely any discussion, for example, of what should be heard 
rather than seen. If several of our characters are talking in a bar, 
maybe one of them should be over in a dark corner. We hear his voice, 
but we don’t see him. He punctuates the few things he says with the 
sound of a bottle he rolls back and forth on the table in front of him. 
Finally he puts a note in the bottle and rolls it across the floor of 
the dark bar. It comes to a stop at the feet of the characters we see. 
This approach could be played for comedy, drama, or some of both as it 
might have been in "Once Upon A Time In The West."  Either way, sound is 
making a contribution. The use of sound will strongly influence the way 
the scene is set up. Starving the eye will inevitably bring the ear, and 
therefore the imagination, more into play. 

 Post Production 

 Finally, in post, sound cautiously creeps out of the closet and 
attempts meekly to assert itself, usually in the form of a composer and 
a supervising sound editor. The composer is given four or five weeks to 
produce seventy to ninety minutes of great music. The supervising sound 
editor is given ten to fifteen weeks to—smooth out the production 
dialog—spot, record, and edit ADR—and try to wedge a few specific sound 
effects into sequences that were never designed to use them, being 
careful to cover every possible option the Director might want because 
there "isn’t any time" for the Director to make choices before the mix. 
Meanwhile, the film is being continuously re-edited. The Editor and 
Director, desperately grasping for some way to improve what they have, 
are meticulously making adjustments, mostly consisting of a few frames, 
which result in the music, sound effects, and dialog editing departments 
having to spend a high percentage of the precious time they have left 
trying to fix all the holes caused by new picture changes. 

 The dismal environment surrounding the recording of ADR is in some ways 
symbolic of the secondary role of sound. Everyone acknowledges that 
production dialog is almost always superior in performance quality to 
ADR. Most directors and actors despise the process of doing 
ADR. Everyone goes into ADR sessions assuming that the product will be 
inferior to what was recorded on the set, except that it will be 
intelligible, whereas the set recording (in most cases where ADR is 
needed) was covered with noise and/or is distorted. 

 This lousy attitude about the possibility of getting anything wonderful 
out of an ADR session turns, of course, into a self fulfilling 
prophecy. Essentially no effort is typically put into giving the ADR 
recording experience the level of excitement, energy, and exploration 
that characterized the film set when the cameras were rolling. The 
result is that ADR performances almost always lack the "life" of the 
original. They’re more-or-less in sync, and they’re intelligible. Why 
not record ADR on location, in real-world places which will inspire the 
actors and provide realistic acoustics? That would be taking ADR 
seriously. like so many other sound-centered activities in movies, ADR 
is treated as basically a technical operation, to be gotten past as 
quickly and cheaply as possible. 

Taking Sound Seriously 

 If your reaction to all this is "So, what do you expect, isn’t it a 
visual medium?" there may be nothing I can say to change your mind. My 
opinion is that film is definitely not a "visual medium."  I think if 
you look closely at and listen to a dozen or so of the movies you 
consider to be great, you will realize how important a role sound plays 
in many if not most of them. It is even a little misleading to say "a 
role sound plays" because in fact when a scene is really clicking, the 
visual and aural elements are working together so well that it is nearly 
impossible to distinguish them. The suggestions I’m about to make 
obviously do not apply to all films. There will never be a "formula" for 
making great movies or great movie sound. Be that as it may........ 

Writing For Sound 

 Telling a film story, like telling any kind of story, is about creating 
connections between characters, places, objects, experiences, and 
ideas. You try to invent a world which is complex and many layered, like 
the real world. But unlike most of real life (which tends to be badly 
written and edited), in a good film a set of themes emerge which embody 
a clearly identifiable line or arc, which is the story. 

 It seems to me that one element of writing for movies stands above all 
others in terms of making the eventual movie as "cinematic" as 
possible:  establishing point of view.  The audience experiences the 
action through its identification with characters. The writing needs to 
lay the ground work for setting up pov before the actors, cameras, 
microphones, and editors come into play. Each of these can obviously 
enhance the element of pov, but the script should contain the 
blueprint. 

 Let’s say we are writing a story about a guy who, as a boy, loved 
visiting his father at the steel mill where he worked. The boy grows up 
and seems to be pretty happy with his life as a lawyer, far from the 
mill.  But he has troubling, ambiguous nightmares that eventually lead 
him to go back to the town where he lived as a boy in an attempt to find 
the source of the bad dreams. 

 The description above doesn’t say anything specific about the possible 
use of sound in this story, but I have chosen basic story elements which 
hold vast potential for sound. First, it will be natural to tell the 
story more-or-less through the pov of our central character. But that’s 
not all. A steel mill gives us a huge palette for sound. Most 
importantly, it is a place which we can manipulate to produce a set of 
sounds which range from banal to exciting to frightening to weird to 
comforting to ugly to beautiful. The place can therefore become a 
character, and have its own voice, with a range of "emotions" and 
"moods."  And the sounds of the mill can resonate with a wide variety of 
elements elsewhere in the story. None of this good stuff is likely to 
happen unless we write, shoot, and edit the story in a way that allows 
it to happen. 

 The element of dream in the story swings a door wide open to sound as a 
collaborator. In a dream sequence we as film makers have even more 
latitude than usual to modulate sound to serve our story, and to make 
connections between the sounds in the dream and the sounds in the world 
for which the dream is supplying clues. Likewise, the "time border" 
between the "little boy" period and the "grown-up" period offers us lots 
of opportunities to compare and contrast the two worlds, and his 
perception of them. Over a transition from one period to the other, one 
or more sounds can go through a metamorphosis. Maybe as our guy 
daydreams about his childhood, the rhythmic clank of a metal shear in 
the mill changes into the click clack of the railroad car taking 
him back to his home town. Any sound, in itself, only has so much 
intrinsic appeal or value. On the other hand, when a sound changes over 
time in response to elements in the larger story, its power and richness 
grow exponentially. 

Opening The Door For Sound, Efficient Dialog 

 Sadly, it is common for a director to come to me with a sequence 
composed of unambiguous, unmysterious, and uninteresting shots of a 
location like a steel mill, and then to tell me that this place has to 
be made sinister and fascinating with sound effects. As icing on the 
cake, the sequence typically has wall-to-wall dialog which will make it 
next to impossible to hear any of the sounds I desperately throw at the 
canvas. 

 In recent years there has been a trend, which may be in 
insidious influence of bad television, toward non-stop dialog in 
films  The wise old maxim that it’s better to say it with action than 
words seems to have lost some ground. Quentin Tarantino has made some 
excellent films which depend heavily on dialog, but he’s incorporated 
scenes which use dialog sparsely as well. 

 There is a phenomenon in movie making that my friends and I sometimes 
call the "100% theory." Each department-head on a film, unless otherwise 
instructed, tends to assume that it is 100% his or her job to make the 
movie work. The result is often a logjam of uncoordinated visual and 
aural product, each craft competing for attention, and often adding up 
to little more than noise unless the director and editor do their jobs 
extremely well. 
 Dialogue is one of the areas where this inclination toward density is 
at its worst. On top of production dialog, the trend is to add as much 
ADR as can be wedged into a scene. Eventually, all the space not 
occupied by actual words is filled with grunts, groans, and breathing 
(supposedly in an effort to "keep the character alive"). Finally the 
track is saved (sometimes) from being a self parody only by the fact 
that there is so much other sound happening simultaneously that at least 
some of the added dialog is masked. If your intention is to pack your 
film with wall-to-wall clever dialog, maybe you should consider doing a 
play 

Characters need to have the opportunity to listen

 When a character looks at an object, we the audience are looking at it, 
more-or-less through his eyes. The way he reacts to seeing the object 
(or doesn’t react) can give us vital information about who he is and how 
he fits into this situation. The same is true for hearing. If there are 
no moments in which our character is allowed to hear the world around 
him, then the audience is deprived of one important dimension of HIS 
life. 

Picture and Sound as Collaborators 

 Sound effects can make a scene scary and interesting as hell, but they 
usually need a little help from the visual end of things. For example, 
we may want to have a strange-sounding machine running off-camera during 
a scene in order to add tension and atmosphere.  If there is at least a 
brief, fairly close shot of some machine which could be making the 
sound, it will help me immensely to establish the sound. Over that shot 
we can feature the sound, placing it firmly in the minds of the 
audience. Then we never have to see it again, but every time the 
audience hears it, they will know what it is (even if it is played very 
low under dialogue), and they will make all the appropriate 
associations, including a sense of the geography of the place. 

 The contrast between a sound heard at a distance, and that same sound 
heard close-up can be a very powerful element. If our guy and an old 
friend are walking toward the mill, and they hear, from several blocks 
away, the sounds of the machines filling the neighborhood, there will be 
a powerful contrast when they arrive at the mill gate. As a former 
production sound mixer, if a director had ever told me that a scene was 
to be shot a few blocks away from the mill set in order to establish how 
powerfully the sounds of the mill hit the surrounding neighborhood, I 
probably would have gone straight into a coma after kissing his 
feet.  Directors essentially never base their decisions about where to 
shoot a scene on the need for sound to make a story contribution. Why 
not? 

Art Direction and Sound as Collaborators 

 Let’s say we’re writing a character for a movie we’re making. This guy 
is out of money, angry, desperate. We need, obviously, to design the 
place where he lives. Maybe it’s a run-down apartment in the middle of a 
big city. The way that place looks will tell us (the audience) enormous 
amounts about who the character is and how he is feeling. And if we take 
sound into account when we do the visual design then we have the 
potential for hearing through his ears this terrible place he 
inhabits. Maybe water and sewage pipes are visible on the ceiling and 
walls. If we establish one of those pipes in a close-up it will do 
wonders for the sound designer’s ability to create the sounds of stuff 
running through and vibrating all the pipes. Without seeing the pipes we 
can still put "pipe sounds" into the track, but it will be much more 
difficult to communicate to the audience what those sounds are. One 
close-up of a pipe, accompanied by grotesque sewage pipe sounds, is all 
we need to clearly tell the audience how sonically ugly this place is. 
After that, we only need to hear those sounds and audience will make the 
connection to the pipes without even having to show them. 

 It’s wonderful when a movie gives you the sense that you really know 
the places in it. That each place is alive, has character and moods. A 
great actor will find ways to use the place in which he finds himself in 
order to reveal more about the person he plays. We need to hear the 
sounds that place makes in order to know it. We need to hear the actor’s 
voice reverberating there. And when he is quiet we need to hear the way 
that place will be without him. 

Starving The Eye, The Usefulness Of Ambiguity 

 Viewers/listeners are pulled into a story mainly because they are led 
to believe that there are interesting questions to be answered, and that 
they, the audience, may possess certain insights useful in solving the 
puzzle. If this is true, then it follows that a crucial element of 
storytelling is knowing what not to make immediately clear, and then 
devising techniques that use the camera and microphone to seduce the 
audience with just enough information to tease them into getting 
involved.  It is as if our job is to hang interesting little question 
marks in the air surrounding each scene, or to place pieces of cake on 
the ground that seem to lead somewhere, though not in a straight line. 
 Sound may be the most powerful tool in the filmmaker’s arsenal in terms 
of its ability to seduce. That’s because "sound," as the great sound 
editor Alan Splet once said, "is a heart thing." We, the audience, 
interpret sound with our emotions, not our intellect. 

 Let’s assume we as film makers want to take sound seriously, and that 
the first issues have already been addressed: 

1) The desire exists to tell the story more-or-less through the 
point of view of one or more of the characters. 

 2) Locations have been chosen, and sets designed which don’t rule out 
sound as a player, and in fact, encourage it. 

 3) There is not non-stop dialog. 

 Here are some ways to tease the eye, and thereby invite the ear to the 
party: 

The Beauty of Long Lenses and Short Lenses 

 There is something odd about looking through a very long lens or a very 
short lens. We see things in a way we don’t ordinarily see them.  The 
inference is often that we are looking through someone else’s eyes. In 
the opening sequence of "The Conversation" we see people in San 
Franciscoís Union Square through a telephoto lens. The lack of depth of 
field and other characteristics of that kind of lens puts us into a very 
subjective space. As a result, we can easily justify hearing sounds 
which may have very little to do with what we see in the frame, and more 
to do with the way the person ostensibly looking through that lens 
FEELS.  The way we use such a shot will determine whether that inference 
is made obvious to the audience, or kept subliminal. 

Dutch Angles and Moving Cameras 

 The shot may be from floor level or ceiling level. The frame may be 
rotated a few degrees off vertical. The camera may be on a track, hand 
held, or just panning. In any of these cases the effect will be to put 
the audience in unfamiliar space. The shot will no longer simply be 
"depicting" the scene. The shot becomes part of the scene. The element 
of unfamiliar space suddenly swings the door wide-open to sound. 

Darkness Around the Edge Of the Frame 

 In many of the great film noir classics the frame was carefully 
composed with areas of darkness. Though we in the audience may not 
consciously consider what inhabits those dark splotches, they 
nevertheless get the point across that the truth, lurking somewhere just 
outside the frame is too complex to let itself be photographed 
easily. Don’t forget that the ears are the guardians of sleep. They tell 
us what we need to know about the darkness, and will gladly supply some 
clues about what’s going on. 

Extreme Close-ups and Long Shots 

 Very close shots of peopleís hands, their clothing, etc. will tend to 
make us feel as though we are experiencing things through the point of 
view of either the person being photographed or the person whose view of 
them we are sharing. Extreme long shots are wonderful for sound because 
they provide an opportunity to hear the fullness or emptiness of a vast 
landscape. Carroll Ballards films The Black Stallion and Never Cry Wolf 
use wide shots and extreme close-ups wonderfully with sound. 

Slow Motion 

 Raging Bull and Taxi Driver contain some obvious, and some very subtle 
uses of slow motion. Some of it is barely perceptible. But it always 
seems to put us into a dream-space, and tell us that something odd, and 
not very wholesome, is happening. 

Black and White Images 

 Many still photographers feel that black and white images have several 
artistic advantages over color. Among them, that black and white shots 
are often less "busy" than color images, and therefore lend themselves 
more to presenting a coherent feeling. We are surrounded in our everyday 
lives by color and color images. A black and white image now is clearly 
"understood" (felt) to be someone’s point of view, not an "objective" 
presentation of events. In movies, like still photography, painting, 
fiction, and poetry, the artist tends to be most concerned with 
communicating feelings rather than "information." Black and white images 
have the potential to convey a maximum of feeling without the "clutter" 
of color. 

 Whenever we as an audience are put into a visual "space" in which we 
are encouraged to "feel" rather than "think," what comes into our ears 
can inform those feelings and magnify them. 

What Do All Of These Visual Approaches Have In Common? 

 They all are ways of withholding information. They muddy the waters a 
little. When done well, the result will be the following implication: 
Gee folks, if we could be more explicit about what is going on here we 
sure would, but it is so damned mysterious that even we, the 
storytellers, don’t fully understand how amazing it is. Maybe you can 
help us take it a little farther." That message is the bait. Dangle it 
in front of an audience and they won’t be able to resist going for it. 
in the process of going for it they bring their imaginations and 
experiences with them, making your story suddenly become their story. 
success. 

  We, the film makers, are all sitting around a table in pre-production, 
brainstorming about how to manufacture the most delectable bait 
possible, and how to make it seem like it isn’t bait at all. (Aren’t the 
most interesting stories always told by guys who have to be begged to 
tell them?) We know that we want to sometimes use the camera to withhold 
information, to tease, or to put it more bluntly:  to seduce. The most 
compelling method of seduction is inevitably going to involve sound as 
well. 

  Ideally, the unconscious dialog in the minds of the audience should be 
something like: "What I’m seeing isn’t giving me enough 
information. What I’m hearing is ambiguous, too. But the combination of 
the two seems to be pointing in the direction of a vaguely familiar 
container into which I can pour my experience and make something I never 
before quite imagined." Isn’t it obvious that the microphone plays just 
as important a role in setting up this performance as does the camera? 

 Editing Picture With Sound In Mind 

 One of the many things a film editor does is to get rid of moments in 
the film in which "nothing" is happening. A desirable objective most of 
the time, but not always. The editor and director need to be able to 
figure out when it will be useful to linger on a shot after the dialog 
is finished, or before it begins. To stay around after the obvious 
"action" is past, so that we can listen. Of course it helps quite a bit 
if the scene has been shot with these useful pauses in mind. Into these 
little pauses sound can creep on it’s stealthy little toes, or its 
clanking jackboots, to tell us something about where we have been or 
where we are going. 

 Walter Murch, film editor and sound designer, uses lots of 
unconventional techniques. One of them is to spend a certain period of 
his picture editing time not listening to the sound at all. He watches 
and edits the visual images without hearing the sync sound which was 
recorded as those images were photographed. This approach can ironically 
be a great boon to the use of sound in the movie. If the editor can 
imagine the sound (musical or otherwise) which might eventually 
accompany a scene, rather than listen to the rough, dis-continuous, 
often annoying sync track, then the cutting will be more likely to leave 
room for those beats in which sound other than dialog will eventually 
make its contribution. 

Sound’s Talents 

 Music, dialogue, and sound effects can each do any of the following 
jobs, and many more: 

*        suggest a mood, evoke a feeling 
*        set a pace 
*        indicate a geographical locale 
*        indicate a historical period 
*        clarify the plot 
*        define a character 
*        connect otherwise unconnected ideas, characters, places, images, or  moments 
*        heighten realism or diminish it 
*        heighten ambiguity or diminish it 
*        draw attention to a detail, or away from it 
*        indicate changes in time 
*        smooth otherwise abrupt changes between shots or scenes 
*        emphasize a transition for dramatic effect 
*        describe an acoustic space 
*        startle or soothe 
*        exaggerate action or mediate it 

At any given moment in a film, sound is likely to be doing several of 
these things at once. 

 But sound, if it’s any good, also has a life of its own, beyond these 
utilitarian functions. And its ability to be good and useful to the 
story, and powerful, beautiful and alive will be determined by the state 
of the ocean in which it swims, the film. Try as you may to paste sound 
onto a predetermined structure, the result will almost always fall short 
of your hopes. But if you encourage the sounds of the characters, the 
things, and the places in your film to inform your decisions in all the 
other film crafts, then your movie may just grow to have a voice beyond 
anything you might have dreamed. 

So, what does a sound designer do? 

 It was the dream of Walter Murch and others in the wildly creative 
early days of American Zoetrope that sound would be taken as seriously 
as image. They thought that at least some films could use the guidance 
of someone well-schooled in the art of sound in storytelling to not only 
create sounds but also to coordinate the use of sound in the film. This 
someone, they thought, would brainstorm with the director and writer in 
pre-production to integrate sound into the story on the page. During 
shooting that person would make sure that the recording and playing-back 
of sound on the set was given the important status it deserves, and not 
treated as a low-priority, which is always the temptation in the heat of 
trying to make the daily quota of shots. In post production that person 
would continue the fabrication and collection of sounds begun in 
pre-production, and would work with other sound professionals 
(composers, editors, mixers), and the Director and Editor to give the 
film’s soundtrack a coherent and well coordinated feeling. 

  This dream has been a difficult one to realize, and in fact has made 
little headway since the early 1970s. The term sound designer has come 
to be associated simply with using specialized equipment to make 
"special" sound effects. On "THX-1138" and "The Conversation" Walter 
Murch was the Sound Designer in the fullest sense of the word. The fact 
hat he was also a Picture Editor on "The Conversation" and "Apocalypse 
Now" put him in a position to shape those films in ways that allowed 
them to use sound in an organic and powerful way. No other sound 
designers on major American films have had that kind of opportunity. 

  So, the dream of giving sound equal status to image is 
deferred. Someday the Industry may appreciate and foster the model 
established by Murch. Until then, whether you cut the dialog, write the 
script, record music, perform foley, edit the film, direct the film or 
do any one of a hundred other jobs, 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.