Why sound matters as much as picture in narrative film, TV, and vertical drama, and what a bad pair of headphones taught me about it.
If something sounds bad, it looks bad. I believe that more than almost anything else about making narrative media. You can have a beautiful frame, careful lighting, and a strong performance, and thin or muddy sound can still undo the whole thing for the viewer. Most people can’t tell you why they stopped believing a scene. They just feel something is off, and the picture usually takes the blame.
Audio carries more of the story than it gets credit for
Dialogue, music, and sound design each move a story forward in a different way. Dialogue tells us who someone is and what they want. Music sets the emotional tone before anyone speaks. Sound design builds the world around the characters and makes it feel like a place that actually exists. Together, they’re a big part of what makes a story convincing in the first place.
Silence belongs on that list too. The absence of sound can change how an audience reads a scene as much as any sound can.
Horror makes it obvious
Horror might be the clearest example. We talk a lot about what the scary thing looks like, but the audio jumpscares and the unsettling composition do almost as much of the work. Mute a scary scene and see how much of the fear survives.
I got a reminder of this on a flight home from Chicago. I was watching IT: Welcome to Derry on the complimentary headphones the flight attendants passed out, and they were awful. They were uncomfortable, the sound was thin, and I could barely understand the dialogue. The jumpscares and the dramatic tension lost a lot of their impact.
I scare easily, so when I watch horror I usually turn the volume down a bit. I think that habit is my brain quietly admitting how much power audio has in the genre. With those headphones, a lot of that power just wasn’t there. The picture hadn’t changed at all, but the experience had.
What this means if you’re making something
If you’re a producer, director, or filmmaker, I’m not saying you need a sound designer at every step of production. But I do think the conversation about tone and atmosphere is worth having earlier than most people have it, because it can save a lot of back-and-forth once the project reaches post.
That applies to short films and features, and it applies to fast-moving formats like vertical series, where pace and tension carry the viewer from one episode to the next. Sound is one of the things that keeps the story moving.
A question worth asking
When you rewatch a favorite scary movie or a scene you love, what does the sound do that you’d miss if it were gone? I find it’s a good way to figure out how much work audio is really doing.
At Prelude Studios, sound is what we spend our days on. My partner Malik handles sound design and engineering, and I work on dialogue and voice. If you’re planning a narrative project and want to talk about sound, you can reach us at info@thepreludestudios.com