- Book author
- Christopher D. Anderson
Sound Design for the Visual Storyteller is an overview of the sound design process for the beginner filmmaker or storyteller, providing the foundational knowledge needed to succeed at utilizing and designing sound for visual stories, films, and even podcasts.
With a focus on television and film, alongside references to podcast, theatre, event, and game sound design, this all-in-one overview begins with the fundamentals of sound and the structure of a professional sound design team, before exploring the practical topics of post-production, creative workflows, and distribution. Supported by a plethora of audio and video examples to demonstrate key concepts, this book guides aspiring sound designers on the power and production value of the well-conceived soundtrack and showcases some of the most effective techniques for getting there.
This is an ideal introduction for storytellers working in a range of contexts, including filmmakers, sound designers, and sound editors, as well as students of sound for film and broadcast.
Christopher D. Anderson is a New England–based sound designer, mixer, sound editor, sound supervisor, and educator. Mr. Anderson has participated in many award-winning programs, working both on set and in post-production.
He has been interested in all manner of recorded sound since acquiring a cassette deck at an impressionable age.
About the Author
I didn’t expect to be in this place.
As a young boy growing up in a very rural setting, I think I was a bit of a bafflement to my parents – there was me, a creative, somewhat musically inclined kid, born to parents who were steeped in careers in healthcare and health sciences. I thought any medical stuff was icky, preferring to expend my attentions and energies on mechanics and electronics. I was that kid who was always dismantling things, from bicycles to radios to the lawnmower to minibikes to my mom’s car, much to her chagrin. I would then advance to electronic circuits, electric guitars, basses, and amplifiers – tinkering, modifying, and essentially hot-rodding them to get them to perform better.
This was all in the name of my intense need to know how things work. Usually, these things could be successfully reassembled, sometimes with only varying degrees of success – at least getting them back together and working as they had been. Bonus points if I could do it without any extra parts lying around.
I began playing guitar at 6 or 7 years old, when I found my dad’s old acoustic guitar in a closet. The action was abysmal, the strings were way too high off the fretboard to be comfortable for my young hands, but I was persistent and serious enough about it that my mom signed me up for lessons. I circled away from the guitar and back again over the years, often more interested in the technology around it and the crazy sounds it could make than actually mastering or playing the instrument itself. More disassembly followed, and more circuits were created … or destroyed.
A very early clue to where my life was headed could be found in my fascination with producing home recordings. My dad was a doctor and received audiocassettes marketing the latest innovations of pharmaceutical companies in an effort to get him (and all doctors) to prescribe their newest product lines.
I guess the fact that it was all on cassette puts a date on my experiences. Blank audiocassettes were an expensive commodity for a 10-year-old with no income, but once I figured out how to defeat the record protection tabs on those free cassettes, they became a near-endless media source. I would use and reuse them for my own (sometimes) nefarious ends. My dad and brothers and I would produce satirical “commercials”, mostly touting the benefits of Mom’s cooking, but also promoting fictitious products and services of our own invention. We also created some rather epic sound stories, developed while I was discovering new modes of storytelling in various comedy show recordings.
Old Jack Benny radio shows were a favorite; I also had the eye-opening experience of listening to a Lenny Bruce album at a friend’s house, as well as early George Carlin. I was fortunate enough to pick up a few Firesign Theater LPs at a neighbor’s yard sale, and my dad was a huge Monty Python fan – we had all the Python LPs, and would also watch the television show regularly. I would also tune in weekly to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, hosted by the venerable E. G. Marshall – that show’s almost cinematic approach to sound design was a source of endless fascination to me, and I could actually see the story in my mind’s eye.
I was also intrigued by the idea of radio personalities – specifically, Rick Dees, Casey Kasem, and Wolfman Jack. With imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I would produce my own radio show with whatever Top 40 music I could grab off the airwaves or cue out of my parents’ collection of LPs. This was entirely for my sense of entertainment, those tapes never saw the light of day, and consequently, my career as a radio personality was never fully realized – but in hindsight, it’s not hard to see this burgeoning career of mine coming on.
There was one epic failed film project in middle school that set the scene for the career that would follow when some friends and I got a hold of an 8mm film camera. There was no way to record sound on those, so we used my trusty cassette recorder and those recycled cassettes for the audio, inadvertently re- inventing the double-system recording setup – but then quickly realizing there was no practical way for us to re-sync those takes back together, particularly with the absence of any kind of system or process to help align them later. And we also kind of forgot (or more likely, just didn’t know) anything about the editing process that should have followed. We had fun shooting our scenes, though, and our loosely scripted, linearly shot narrative made sense to us, at least, even if we couldn’t adequately assemble it when we were done. Our teacher was very kind and gave us a good grade anyway, based only on seeing some of our raw footage and after enduring some very disjointed in-class playback efforts – an A for effort, I suppose – but that first failed attempt at a dailies
session was the germ of an idea for me that ultimately led to my future in audio post-production.
