4.2.1: Sound Editing

Exploring the Art of Sound Design

In the last chapter, we focused on editing the visual elements in a motion picture and how the shots fit together to create a narrative flow and communicate with the audience. As it turns out, sound requires a similar approach in post-production and is often even more “invisible” than picture editing techniques. (In fact, if there are any sound editors reading this book, they probably noticed that picture editing has a whole chapter, and all they get is this one crumby section. Typical.)

But sound editing is much more than simply joining up the sounds that already exist. It involves creating all of the sounds that weren’t recorded on set to make up the rich soundscape of the finished motion picture. In that sense, it is literally more “creative” than picture editing! (How’s that, sound editors? Feel better now?)

One important bit of post-production sound creation has to do with dialogue. Sometimes, an actor’s dialogue for that perfect take is unusable because of distracting ambient sounds or a poorly placed microphone. (C’mon, location sound recordist, you had one job!) In that case, sound editors bring in the actors to perform ADR, short for Automated Dialogue Replacement (sometimes also referred to as Additional Dialogue Recording or “looping”). They simply play the scene in a repeating “loop” as the actors record the lines repeatedly until they match the performance on screen. Then, the sound editors adjust the quality of the recording to match the setting of the scene.

But what about all those other sounds that weren’t recorded on set? The birds chirping, the cars passing, even those footsteps? Those too, have to be created and gathered together in post-production and layered into the sound design. Many of these sounds already exist in extensive sound libraries, pre-recorded by sound technicians and made available for editors. But many of them must be created to match exactly what the audience will see on screen. That’s where foley artists come in.

Foley artists are a special breed of technicians, part sound recordists, and part performance artists. Their job is to fill in the missing sounds in a given scene. By any means necessary:

Foley artists have to get creative when it comes to imitating common (and not-so-common) sounds. But sound editors must go beyond recreating the most obvious sounds associated with a scene. Every rustle of clothing, a hand on a cup, brushing a hair behind an ear. These tiny details, most of which we would never notice unless they weren’t there, help create continuity in the final edit.

Yes, there’s that word again: continuity. Editing pictures for continuity means creating a narrative flow that keeps the audience engaged with the story. Editing sound for continuity has the same goal but relies on different techniques. For example, if we see someone walking on gravel but hear them walking on a hardwood floor, that break with continuity – or, in this case, logic – will take us out of the narrative. The soundscape must match the cinematography to maintain continuity. And since so much of the sound we hear in cinema is created and added in post-production, that requires incredible attention to detail.

But there are other ways editors can use sound to support the principle of narrative continuity, and not always by matching exactly what we see on screen. For example, a sound bridge can be used to help transition from one shot to another by overlapping the sound of each shot. This can be done in anticipation of the next shot by bringing up the audio before we cut to it on screen, known as a J-cut, or by continuing the audio of the previous shot into the first few seconds of the next, known as an L-cut. This technique is most noticeable in transitions between radically different scenes, but editors use it constantly in more subtle ways, especially in dialogue-heavy scenes. Here are some quick examples:

And just like picture editing, sound editing can also work against audience expectations, leaning into discontinuity with the use of asynchronous sounds that seem related to what we’re seeing on screen but are otherwise out of sync. These are sound tricks intended to either directly contrast what we see on screen or to provide just enough disorientation to set us on edge. Here’s one famous example of asynchronous sound from Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935):

The woman opening the train compartment door discovers a dead body, but instead of hearing her scream, we hear the train whistle. In this case, we get an asynchronous sound combined with a J-cut.

Production sound recording and sound editing are all part of the overall sound design of cinema, and there are lots of moving parts to track throughout the process. Take a look at how one filmmaker, David Fincher (along with Christopher Nolan, George Lucas, and a few others), uses all of these elements of sound design to embrace the idea of sound as co-expressive with the moving image: