Monthly Theme: Fear

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. – Bertrand Russell

It seems only fitting that as we wrap up Halloween that we delve into the season’s most prominent emotion: fear.

While horror sound design and making just the right mixture of viscous liquid for appropriate gore sounds is part of what we do, so too, is the sound design of psychological fear. Crafting dread, paranoia, or insanity are each nuanced visages of taking sound and using them to inflect the fears of a character or the audience.

But for me, what is an even more interesting aspect of fear, is not the application of fear within our craft but the wrestling with this emotion we may face daily. Fear comes in so many flavors both personal and professional: Fear of the dark. Or that recurring dream of being naked in class. The fear of an approaching deadline when our workload is already overloaded. A difficult client’s endless revisions written in a nonsensical scribble. For some people, the very notion of having to design sounds for a user interface will strike terror into their hearts. For others, cutting footsteps for the thousandth time may force them to cower outside the foley room. For some, the struggles of self-doubt can be crippling, while others may suffer from the immobilizing pangs of designer’s block.

This month we’ll be exploring fear as our theme and hope to tackle some of these issues as they pertain to our professional lives. What do you think of in your work life when you think of fear?

Don’t be afraid.

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Please email richard [at] this site to contribute an article for this month’s topic. And as always, please feel free to go “off-topic” if there’s something else you’re burning to share with the community.