A small thread about the early sound design process: These days I’m having several script meetings with the director of an upcoming feature film. They will shoot in June so now is a great chance to discuss overall thoughts, concepts and ideas but also go into script details. 1/8

It’s a very inspirational process: listening to music and showing clips from other films. What feel are we aiming for? The movie is a dark comedy and the idea is to not make fun of the characters but make them emotional and engaging. Sound should be subjective but also fun. 2/8

Having this concept in the back of our heads, we’re going through the script scene by scene to talk through how to utilize sound in the best possible way. Several scenes take place in a factory and we’ve been talking about how the different machinery need specific sounds. 3/8

This talk about the sound of the factory has already influenced the way director will shoot some scenes so that some sequences will be quiet and some loud. A few scenes will be built around a specific rhythm that we create in advance so the acting and the sound interact. 4/8

By really going into details of individual scenes we also make sure that the actors react properly to the sonic environments we want to built. Is a place loud or quiet? And the main actor might have a bit of a twitch that will help us built an internal sonic world for him. 5/8

We want great dynamics. In a couple of instances, our talks made the director switch around scenes in the script so they work better with the overall sonic flow. He also added a couple of scenes with the main character with no dialogue but with room for subjective soundscapes.6/8

The director and DOP have already visited lots of locations and it’s inspiring to look at pictures of these together. During our talks I make lists of sounds I want to collect. The idea is to make a small sound library for the picture editor before the shoot is even finished. 7/8

Next step for me will be to meet with the director and composer together and then the composer will work on the first sketches for the film based on the script. The composer and I will exchange sounds as we would like to built music from the factory sounds, for example. 8/9

Of course, you never know how many of these ideas end up in the final film. Not all of them, that’s for sure. Moviemaking is unpredictable. But it’s a wonderful way of starting a collaboration and finding a common language about the film. Highly recommended. End of thread. 9/9