When we start talking about sound design most people will automatically think about it in relation to action or sci-fi films; maybe horror or animation. Occasionally, you’ll find people talking about the use of sound in a drama…frequently in those cases, the idea of employing hyper reality. It’s a far more rare occasion to find people talking about the use of sound in documentary. The most common concerns with sound for docs is dialog intelligibility and noise reduction. Those are important, certainly, but the contributions that sound can make to a factual narrative can be profound. There’s also a lot of work going on in the doc community, and we’re going to try and shed some light on it this month.
Guest contributions from the community are a big part of what makes this site special, and we know a lot of you have some connection to this month’s topic. If you’d like to contribute to the discussion this month, or are interested in taking part in next month’s theme (psychoacoustics)…then contact [shaun {at} this website].
I’m very excited about this months topic. I took a class on documentaries and not once did we ever talk about the sound design.
This topic is pretty vital for me, just in a few days I’ll start my sound-post work on feature-length documentary, which involves a lot of sound design (director is pretty open and forward-thinking-in-sound person). This will be my first experience in docu, and I’m pretty excited about it, now I’m looking for any info on the topic, looking forward to get some tips from designingsound!
Here is a great designingsound.org gem from the archives.
https://designingsound.org/2013/02/peter-albrechtsen-sound-design-master-class-available-on-vimeo/