We have a large chalkboard in our kitchen. It serves two purposes. The first is to act as a family schedule to remind us where we all need to be on any particular day. The second, is a todo list that my wife writes for me, listing all the jobs that need doing around the house. They include painting things, fixing things and anything else that needs attending to. Thankfully there’s no deadlines on each task, it’s a ‘do them when you get around to it’ list. Sometimes they can be on there for months and then one day I wipe them from the list.
One such task was to fix a cupboard in our downstairs bathroom we use for guests. It’s built in under the stairs so it has a toilet, a small corner wash basin (made for people with tiny hands) a mirror and a cupboard, where we store all related gumph. When the builder installed it a few years ago he made the cupboard next to the sink out of MDF. It was then painted without using primer. MDF next to a sink - guess what happened next? Yep, over time water got in and the MDF started to blow, around the handles and at the bottom next to the tile. It wasn’t an easy fix, this time it had to be done right. The first job was to remove the doors, sand them down, fill them, undercoat and repaint. I also got some softwood, instead of MDF, to use for the skirting by the tile, after all MDF was always going to go bad in situ. I fixed the wood skirting, filled it, primed it and then painted it in several coats. It took the best part of a day.
I’m pleased with it, in fact I’ve done such a good job of it this time that you can’t tell the work that’s been done. I doubt anyone will give it a second thought when using the facilities. Oddly enough it was easy to see when it was a bad job. What a paradox eh!
It’s the same when we work on audio projects, be they music or post, some of our best work goes unseen and in many cases the only fingerprints you leave on the project are your credit… that’s one reason why credits matter.
I’ve recently watched the fantastic Disney+ documentary Light and Magic, it tells the story of the creation and subsequent work on countless movies by the team at Industrial Light and Magic. The work they did, especially in the early days on movies like Star Wars was mindblowing. Often inventing concepts and technology to accomplish special effects, and there were a lot of ingenious tricks used to achieve some shots too, some so simple to create, once figured out, they leave you speechless.
However, there’s a telling quote in the show when one of team says; “if they leave the movie theatre saying how amazing the effects are then we’ve not done our job. The effects are there to help tell the story.”
The job of audio creatives is to do work with great composers, musicians, singers, or film and TV makers that’s so good that we leave no fingerprints behind. I’ve done so many things on work over the years that took me hours to figure out and complete and not even the client knows I’ve done it.
For example, about a year ago I was given the job of producing a new advert for a plugin, it was mid-pandemic and so I was unable to attend the shoot at a top studio in London. Instead a crew shot for me. However, to prevent any technical errors we paid for an engineer to be on standby in the studio to help with gear set-up. We had a top crew, some great talent, and a top London recording studio… what could go wrong?
The rushes arrived and they looked and sounded great, that was until I watched back the shots of the female singer. She was singing her heart out into the side of a Shure SM7. I looked in disbelief and once I’d gone through my “how the F*CK did this happen!" rant, I then had to consider the remedy.
One option was a reshoot, but with talent travelling from another part of the country, as well as crew, this was going to be costly. However, even before I made a decision on that one, the talent got COVID. We couldn’t reshoot.
There was only one option, to replace a Shure SM7 in live footage with another microphone that didn’t look like it had been set-up by an idiot that didn’t know one end of a mic from the other. To do this requires a number of processes. First there’s the removal of the old mic from moving images and then there’s the job of replacing it convincingly. That requires several techniques including painting out, compositing, rotoscoping the new microphone in, and then lighting the entire shot again to make the composite look convincing. Thanks to the pioneering work of people like ILM and modern computers the job is a lot easier than it used to be, but it still takes a lot of time to do it right. And doing it right means that nobody ever knows the mic has been replaced. It took hours but it was worth it.
It’s likely you’ve watched the advert for the plugin, it’s been seen by tens of thousands of people and no-one can see the work done to replace the mic, that’s how it’s meant to be. Some of our best work is never noticed.
That’s an example of some tough visual post work, but I’ve lost count of the hours spent over a hot DAW trying to get the audio right for a project, knowing that in many cases the client and the listener will be oblivious to most of my efforts.
We spend a great deal of time removing noise, getting a great reverb sound, killer synth, or arranging mics to get the perfect drum sound, but the aim of much of our work is to do it in such a way that no one ever notices. I know for a fact that my wife doesn’t notice the sound of a snare in the tracks she loves, she’s caught up in the song and the story - and that’s how it’s meant to be.
An easy way to drive our partners crazy is to start pointing out elements of music or post production, we think they are interested - in most cases they couldn’t care less.
Our work is audio illusion, we take a song, a movie, or a TV show and tell stories, or create auditory spaces and worlds that didn’t exist in the first place, using the amazing tools at our disposal, experience and skill. Some years ago I was given some wise advice, “as those who are not the story our job is to get out of the way.”
It’s likely no one will ever know what you did to deliver the project, it can feel a little depressing if we dwell on it and hope to be seen. Doing great work to serve the artist or the actor is a case of being invisible, for some that’s a tough call. However an even greater consolation is to know we can do things with sound that people have no idea of how it was done. Now that’s magic!