Sound

I’m in the midst of sound editing a project. It’s funny, because while I am definitely an “image” film maker, by which I mean the image was and always will be my first concern, over time I have found myself devoting more and more time and energy to the soundtracks of my films and videos. That’s a very ironic development, because as my friends from my production school days would tell you, the sound in my films was always their biggest single technical weakness.

But as I spend so much time on sound, I’m painfully aware (literally) of just how loud most movies and television shows are. It’s really an assault, a kind of bludgeoning that betrays the insecurity of the people making such crap. The rich creative potential of the soundtrack, its ability to excite the imagination, to expand our emotional responses to the situation, to develop a strong sense of physical presence, or to work in contrapuntal relationship with the image is ignored in favor of a bland blanket of slick, aural plasticene. Instead of being used creatively, sound is usually used to drive every thought and feeling out of our heads. What a waste.