Sound Design & Mix

Audio drives video

Sound design and mix is one place a piece can be made or lost. On MGMT the interviews went on green screen against factory floor plates for one reason: a winding floor is loud, and the piece needed every word clean. On What Could Possibly Go Wrong? the football cannon had to hit harder on television than it did on the field, which is sound design's job: the impact, the whistle of the ball, the crowd.

Sound changes what people think they saw: a badly lit shot with the right effect under it reads as better lit than a well lit one with a cheap sound effect. An interview is a piece of music, too. On Meta AR the cut was checked for whether the musicality carried from one phrase to the next, because a sentence that reads well on paper can still land flat in the ear.

What you get is a mix made by the person who made the edit, and the care that comes with knowing every frame.