The audio post process is generally looked upon as an addendum in terms of its importance and relevance to entertainment and advertising content. The picture aspect of film, TV and commercials has often overshadowed sound. But much of what we often attribute to the cinematic experience of sight and imagery is actually the effect of the soundtrack.
Apart from the basics, such as reducing production noise, equalizing the vocal inflection of a line, scrubbing a millisecond of a sound, or repositioning an ambient breath, audio postproduction adds various levels of subtleties which collaborate and support its corresponding visuals. Words like "swish," "clang," "hum," "echo," "reverb," "rattle," "smash"—verbiage typical in audio jargon—evoke feelings that augment what we are seeing. Great sound mixers are artists, much like great cinematographers, visual effects supervisors and picture editors.
Audio post is ultimately all about storytelling. The processes of voice recording, mixing, sound design, Foley and ADR affect the story in countless ways. With the right mix, sound can suggest a mood, evoke a feeling, indicate a geographical place, historical period or change in time, clarify the plot, define characters, connect disconnected moments, heighten or diminish realism, smooth abrupt transition scenes, startle or soothe, and on and on. At any given moment, audio is likely to be doing several of these things at once, infusing the content with a rich mixture of moods and meanings. In this respect, audio delivers a distinctive experience to the audience, which substantiates the imagery.
Sound works on the audience subconsciously. While most viewers can differentiate various sight impressions in a picture, listeners can rarely perceive sound so analytically; they tend to take sound in as a whole, despite its actually being deliberately constructed from many pieces. This visual predisposition, coupled with the difficulty to sort sound into separate elements, produces a willing suspension of disbelief in the audience. In other words, sound makes viewed content infinitely more believable. This principle is especially effective in the genre of animation, since this kind of content is the hardest to relate to in terms of believability.
Skillful synchronicity of sight and sound delivers a heightened experience we think belongs only to the image, when in fact they actually transform one another in the audience’s perceptions. The mixer creates a seemingly spontaneous and irresistible weld between a particular auditory moment and visual moment when they occur in the same time frame. These welded moments are not associated but rather synergized as one, forming a functional interaction of image and sound that is the basis of our entire understanding and experience of filmed entertainment and advertising.
What we think we are seeing actually turns out to be, to a large degree, what we are hearing. Without the presence of artfully recorded and mixed sound, the viewing experience as we have come to expect it would be vacant. It is the mixer who stands at the last outpost of the process to ensure that we see and hear at an optimum level of sensation and enjoyment. The mixer is the master artist who has to equalize, blend and balance all the innumerable audio and video tracks into the seamless, invisible phenomenon of the synchronized audio/visual experience. In this respect, audio post is one of the most powerful tools in the filmmaker’s arsenal in terms of its ability to seduce the audience. It is not an afterthought, but an indispensable element in the creative storytelling process, as well as the processes of influencing, persuading, entertaining and selling.
