Sounds Award-Worthy To Me!
An Expert Expounds Upon the Differences Between Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing
Awards season is almost at its close, and being a self-confessed awards-junkie, I’m excitedly checking different websites that try their best to predict the Oscars. Around this time every year, people closely investigate lead and supporting actors and actresses and try to guess who will be taking home the ultimate trophy. Best Picture is, of course, hotly contested and it’s rarely the film that is considered “in the lead” in December that takes home that fated trophy in February. However, I’m not here to discuss the so-called “Top Five” Oscars. I’m here to discuss two much more important awards — Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing.
As I’m sure many of you know, (most) films have sound. Sound is that aspect of the film that affects your ears more than it affects your eyes. When you clap your hands, it makes a sound. When actors talk into a microphone, it creates sound. Sometimes filmmakers even add in extra sounds later, for instance, gunshots or popcorn. Filmmakers also add a sort of musical sound called “music,” but that’s an entirely different discussion.
Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing are usually presented one after another, since they both begin with the word “Sound.” There is a big difference between the two, though. Let’s begin with Best Sound Mixing.
The Best Sound Mixing category is voted on by the entire Academy, even people with no knowledge of the way sound works (for instance, actors), so hopefully they understand what the term means or take a short online seminar on the topic. The five films nominated for Best Sound Mixing are: Arrival, Hacksaw Ridge, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, La La Land, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Choosing the winner is difficult. It’s tough to judge based on sound alone, because all of those films have some form of sound. It might be best to go with the film that contains the loudest sound, which I would assume is Rogue One (I haven’t seen it), because I’m told it contains many blasters and spaceships. However, “less is more” is a popular saying, so perhaps we should go with the quietest film, which I assume is La La Land because the only character in the film who owns a gun is Seb’s sister, but we never see it. But while La La Land is a tempting choice, but some of the sound “mixed” in is music, which has its own separate categories, so maybe we shouldn’t get the two mixed up. In the end, I have to go with the film with blasters: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Now we move on to Best Sound Editing. Sound Editing, as you might have guessed, is different from Sound Mixing. Again, all Academy members vote on the winner of this category, I assume after closely examining the raw sound files and interviewing the sound editors on their process. The films nominated for Best Sound Editing are: Arrival, Deepwater Horizon, Hacksaw Ridge, La La Land, and Sully. Choosing a winner here is perhaps even more difficult, because is it even possible to edit sound? Perhaps we should think of it as the art of “creating” sound. I doubt any sound was “created” for Deepwater Horizon, Sully, or La La Land because oil rigs, the Hudson River, and Los Angeles all exist in real life. Hacksaw Ridge and Arrival, however, both take place during fictional events (World War II and Amy Adam’s time as a linguistics professor), which means that the sound editors had to create sounds for the films. Which one involved the creation of more sound? A quick Google search tells me that Hacksaw Ridge has a running time of 2 hours and 19 minutes, while Arrival only has a running time of 1 hour and 58 minutes, which forces me to draw the conclusion that Hacksaw Ridge involved the creation of more sound, and therefore the editing of more sound, and therefore deserves this award.
For those interested in actually learning the difference between the two categories, there are numerous articles that explain what each term means and how each step of the process affects the final film. I, however, know which of the five soundiest films of the year was my favorite, and I plan to vote for that. I also hope to enjoy the maximum-thirty-second speech that each of the winners will make, because it takes a special talent to condense months of tiring, thankless work into half-a-minute of thank yous.
