Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1353865
60 I M PS E . O R G can be carried right the way through to the final mixing stage, in a straightforward and convenient way. Much of what a re-recording mixer does is instinctive: we tend to 'know' when the mix is right; but expressing what it is that makes that happen, or understanding what someone who doesn't predominantly work in sound means, or what they expect from you, can be a real challenge; even with today's collaborative working tools. In this respect, it's also a useful tool for academics to use as a teaching aid to help analyse, understand, and illustrate what's going on in the soundtrack. For far too many film production students, audio post-production gets dealt a poor hand, with little insight other than it's a process that somehow happens right at the end of the production by some clever technical folk. And it's in this way that any involvement with sound is all but avoided; and the great cycle of misunderstanding sound moves round to the next generation. Whilst the Four Sound Areas framework is designed as a new planning and communication tool, it's not actually replacing anything that's currently in place, especially if that's working fine for you. It's simply available as a convenient roadmap for anyone and everyone to follow regarding the soundtrack; and to improve the creative conversations that can be had between a director and his sound designer/supervising sound editor, or between a picture editor and a sound editor at the outset of a project. If you're a highly experienced audio professional, working with highly experienced picture editing professionals, you will already have your own workflow arrangements in place: so things like 'we'd like an AAF in this way' or 'we'd like you to give us access to all the MXF data,' those detailed delivery kinds of things are completely unaffected by the Four Sound Areas framework. Instead, it's designed to work at a higher level than that, allowing a freer, conceptual conversation to be more easily had between the director and their picture editor, or their sound designer and supervising sound editor. Do you think this concept influences the way Dolby Atmos & Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality will reproduce sound? I can definitely see how the Four Sound Areas could be an aid to sound designing for AR/VR, and also for Dolby Atmos; because these are platforms that require conspicuous and careful thought with regard to their sound design. And because the Four Sound Areas framework is a tool expressly created to focus the thoughts of all the interested parties solely on sound design, and more specifically, on what emotional experience is intended for the end user (the 'listening-viewer') at any given moment, it could prove to be really useful for such things as AR/VR sound design. In the end, it'sall about giving the audience a taste of the real sound world. Where do we go from here? Well, sometimes it is about giving the audience a taste of the real world, an immersive experience that helps them to feel as if they are right there in a scene; but at other times, we actually want to deliver either an enhanced or a diminished aural experience—something that is either much greater or much less than reality would actually be. But the driving force behind all of those decisions comes down to the emotion that we would like the audience to be feeling at any particular moment—and that in itself is a concept that is as old as edited pictures. Long before the talkies, the introduction of picture editing to show a scene from multiple angles, to make a logical sequence, came about with an emotional intent in mind (the first film to contain more than one shot is often attributed to Robert W. Paul's Come Along, Do! [1898]); and even today, our sound design decisions come down to what we would like the audience to be feeling at key points of the story being told… So, in a way, it's a 'back to the future' situation: that which has held good for almost a century of sound films—the desire to evoke an emotional response in the audience through the thoughtful use of sound—still remains at the epicentre of our endeavours as sound designers, sound editors, and Neil Hillman MPSE. The Producers' Forum.