What is sound design?
Sound design is the half of a film that most people never notice and every person feels. It covers the sounds that were not recorded on the day or were recorded badly: footsteps, fabric, a door, the hum of a room, the city outside a window, the whoosh of a title, the low tone that makes a reveal feel large. It also covers the shaping of sounds that were recorded, the cleaning, layering, placing and processing that turns a raw track into a world. In practice the sound designer works between the dialogue editor and the composer, building everything the picture needs that neither of them provides.
The job is older than the term. Films have always needed their sounds made, and the term sound design arrived in the 1970s when the craft began to be treated as an authored layer rather than a technical fix. In branded film it is the difference between a product that sits on a table and a product that exists: the sound of leather, metal, glass and skin is what tells the audience the thing is real.
Why it matters
Why sound design matters
The ear believes faster than the eye. A beautifully shot film with thin, mismatched or absent sound reads as cheap in a way the viewer cannot name, and the same footage with a designed track reads as expensive, finished and true. Sound carries emotion that picture alone cannot: tension, space, intimacy, scale. The moment in a trailer when the world goes silent before the hit is sound design; so is the warmth of a documentary interview in a room that sounds like a room.
For a brand it is also identity. The way a luxury house's films sound, hushed, precise, close, is as recognizable as the way they look, and a brand that pays attention to sound across its work builds a signature that the audience recognizes with their eyes closed. The brands that ignore it sound like everyone else, which usually means like stock music over silence.
In practice
How sound design works in practice
- 01
Sound design begins at the edit lock, when the picture is fixed and the sound designer can build to it. They start with the production audio, cleaning dialogue and salvaging what was captured on set, then build the layers: ambiences that place each scene in a space, foley for every movement and touch, hard effects for the things that need weight, and designed elements, the tones, hits and textures that give a film its feel. Each element is placed in the stereo or surround field and timed to the frame.
- 02
The track is then mixed. The sound designer, or a separate mixer, balances dialogue, effects and music so that the right thing is heard at every moment, and delivers versions for every destination: a theatrical mix, a broadcast mix, a stereo mix for the web and a version that survives a phone speaker with the volume low. Reviews happen in a proper room, because a mix judged on laptop speakers will be wrong everywhere else. For social cuts, the design is checked with the sound off, since most people will watch it that way, and the version with sound has to reward the ones who turn it on.
At RIOT
Sound design at RIOT
A trailer lives or dies on its sound. The new identity trailer we made for the Washington Commanders needed the weight of a stadium in the low end and the precision of a brand in the details, and the designed sound did as much of that work as the picture. The films for Tiffany & Co., from the Schlumberger film to "Where Light Meets Rebellion," asked for the opposite: a hush, where the small sounds of metal and stone have to carry the room and the audience should feel they are standing next to the piece.
Watch out
What people get wrong about sound design
Leaving it to the music. A track laid over picture is not a soundtrack; it masks the absence of sound rather than providing it, and the result is a film that feels like a slideshow. The other mistake is scheduling it last and short. Sound design needs the same care as the grade and usually gets a fraction of the time, which is why so many well-shot films sound unfinished.
A third mistake is mixing for the edit suite. A track that sounds enormous on studio monitors can disappear on a phone, and the designer has to build for every place the film will be heard, not just the one where it was made.
