This is probably evident to a lot of people, but your boss has a huge impact on how good your project sounds. I’m talking about the director, or the game designer. If you want to get any of your ideas into the project, you have to get them to buy off on it. This is probably an obvious statement, but how often do we remind ourselves of it? MPSE does an awesome job of honoring those directors who appreciate what good sound brings to their films. Kudos to them! Without the support of the boss, even the most skilled sound professionals will have a hard time contributing their best work. It goes deeper than that though.
I can clearly remember the first time I realized how important that top level boss is to making an awesome sounding design or mix. I remember hating that specific idea my boss wanted me to do…not try, do! It was an order. I remember the first time I realized that the problem wasn’t the request, but my approach to that request. That moment changed the way I did everything ever since. If we want our ideas entertained, we need to entertain the ideas of others.
Of course, that’s not to say that every idea that comes down (or goes up, mind you) is a good one, but there at least might be the kernel of a good one buried somewhere underneath.
Good point. What came to mind as I read this is that sometimes as sound designers we will go through a whole thought process on our own and try things out and finally arrive to a place where we have tried out several ideas and got to what we think is the best option. Equally we may have arrived to an idea that we love because we have come to it via a long thought process and have many reasons in our thought process that make the idea a great one and one that that actually has quite a lot of depth that ties in with the story or the characters or whatever it is we are working on.
However when presenting these things to the directors we often just play them a scene to review and maybe do not explain our thought process so when they hear something we think is great they will just be like…’not sure about that little sound there…take it out’. That little sound may be the essence of this idea we put so much thought into. I feel if we do not explain the thought process to them then we are not doing our work properly and we need to at least have them see what is behind that idea. Too often we just say ‘oh sure yea..we can take that out’ and a great idea may go unused. Even better…we should involve them earlier on in our thought process so that it evolves together…this will hopefully lead to even better ideas or moments and if nothing else will augment the appreciation the directors have for our work when they see the depth of the thought processes we go through. Of course sometimes our ideas were actually just not very good so its important to forget any ego/attachment to the idea and drop it too when that is the case. I’ve had directors question a design moment or idea and ask for it to be dropped but after asking them to just let me explain my thought process behind it or the intention of it they have thought it was a great idea and it has stayed in…or we then developed it more from there on…and of course at times we just dropped it anyways. But at least they were aware of the full intention before discarding it. Anyways, liking these little Sunday posts :)
Glad you’re liking them, Enos!
I’ve had success with the very same tactic, Enos. Obviously, it can’t always be employed (it’s a good idea to pick and choose your battles), but it’s an excellent approach if you have strong reasoning for the choices you’ve made. If what you think is a great idea doesn’t make it into a project though, you can always kick it down the road to a future project. That’s the great thing about creative work, you can come back to ideas in different contexts when they don’t work the first time you’ve tried them.