Sam Fishkin
A friend recalled his first college film class where he was told, “90% of your film is determined by your visuals.” In another class, the lesson was that “the edit tells the entire story.” Later in a film sound class he heard, “Sound is 80% of the film.” What? Is that 220%? Clearly, this was not the math department.
I’m not going to claim one aspect of filmmaking as more important than another. Making a movie is one of the most collaborative endeavors requiring every type of creative energy and skill whether written, verbal, visual, auditory, emotional, physical, kinesthetic, or technical. But one thing that makes sound vital to a film (other than a silent film). Good or bad, if the volume is turned up, you’ll hear something. You can wear earplugs, cup hands over your ears, or plug them with your fingers. Other than that, you can’t close your ears.
Those of us who record and mix audio know this and spend a lot of our waking hours ears open to all the sounds (and noises and impacts) around us. When mixing, we try to prioritize what you hear of the dialog, ambiences, foley, sound effects, and music. Sometimes there are dozens of layers of each of these – happening all at one time. And that’s the other thing that makes sound different than visuals. Time.
Visuals in a film are twenty four (or five in Europe) still images strung together every second. One of those still images can communicate aspects of the story. Think of a movie poster or a photograph, an image frozen in time but visible for as long as you look at it. Sound however is, essentially, continuous. There’s no equivalent to the single frame. Sound is a wave traveling in time. No time, no sound. Even in digital audio, the predominant way audio is now delivered, our brain senses the 48,000 samples per second (or more) as continuous sound. If I pull out one of the millions of samples from a film or song and play that 1/48,000 of a second by itself, you might hear a click. Likely, it’d be so short you’d have no sense of it.
Does that make a film’s soundtrack more important? Is it 50% of the experience? I don’t know. I will say that Sound Matters. Even if the visuals are beautiful or the story compelling, if the sound is crappy, annoying, more noise than not, I cannot close my ears or ‘listen’ away. I have to leave the theater or turn off the volume (which I have done). Which is a shame because good sound is fairly easy to achieve these days.