The Sound Engineer’s role in the making of a commercial
A few weeks after being at the studio, things started making a little sense. I was starting to see a pattern in how the job was done, it’s different elements and how it’s much more than what I thought it was.
At this point, I knew that sonically, every ad film had three types of audio. The music, dialogues and sound effects(sfx). Think of a scene in a commercial where someone walks upto a door and opens it, you don’t think about it but you hear footsteps, the sound of the door knob being turned, the door creaking if it’s an old one, and finally the sound of it being shut. All of this was most likely manually placed by a Sound Engineer onto the film. Not to mention things like the ceiling fan running in the background, maybe the sound of a car passing by outside, birds chirping. That’s sound design for ya!
The way every little sound is added in to make it sound real was extremely fascinating to me and overtime as an Assistant Engineer it’s something I would always do and keep ready before the Engineer came in so I could get feedback on my work.
The dialogues work a little differently. Most of the times they are recorded when the film is being shot, this is called sync sound. But occasionally the recording has too much background noise in it or wasn’t recorded cleanly and we had to re-record them in the studio. For this the film is played to the voice artist in the recording room(there’s a tv in there too). They listen to how the dialogue was said, and say it back into the mic matching the performance of the actor in the film. The result, is a clean indistinguishable dialogue that synchronizes perfectly with the original voice. Voice acting is an art in itself and I’ll write more about it in a future article.
And then there’s music. This is done by the Music Director and the Sound Engineer only comes in once the music is done, to Mix the music in with the voices and sfx.
Mixing is the most important and final part of the sonic process. Finding the right balance between the three types of audio and their individual intricacies is quite the challenge mainly due to the extreme complexity of all the different layers. Do that and then you can send the audio master out and call it a day.
