As has come before; many of these posts will be philosophical in nature. Some will be in contradiction to previous postings. These are not intended as truths or assertions, they’re merely thoughts…ideas. Think of this as stream of consciousness over a wide span…Please bare with us as we traverse the abstract canals of audio musings.
This weekend I have a filmmaking friend in town visiting me in the Bay Area from LA. During the trip we’ve visited Lucasfilm, Pixar, The Walt Disney Family History Museum and later today, the Charles M. Schulz Museum. It’s been a great reminder of how many disparate pieces there are that come together in the creation of a piece of entertainment media such as a film or video game. When we were exploring the Walt Disney Family History Museum there was a particular “creative flow-chart” which caught my attention. There’s a detail shot at the head of this post but here’s the whole thing.
This beautiful chart can help give some perspective to the work that some of us do that is often lost when we attend a specialist school or college where everyone is studying the same thing, or when we engage in our social-media-spheres or attend meet-ups with those who exist solely within our field, or when we work for a specialist service company, or remotely as a freelancer cut-off from the rest of the content producers, or when we work in post-production and we’re the only ones left on the project.
It’s easy to get lost in our own world and when I see people (myself included) preaching the importance and underutilized power of sound, perhaps also bemoaning it’s neglect, I remind myself that we’re just one part of the process and it’s not about the sound, music, art, the words on the script, but about the story or experience as a whole. I try and keep this in mind whenever I work directly with a director or game designer, this sense of perspective. That while I will through conversations, exposure and experimentation, develop an strong appreciation for the purpose of the work and my place within it, I won’t approach the same level of innate understanding for what is “right” or “wrong” for the project than those who created that which I serve.
And now for a Haiku…
When we work in sound
Often we are as a sound
Interconnected
