Good Sound Sells / Bad Sound Sucks

We were at the NMPA Just Finish It! event today and had a great conversation at the post party with Post-Production Supervisor Michael Donnelley and his partner, Laura. (Sorry, Laura, I either didn't get or forgot your last name, but we both really enjoyed talking to you this evening!) You'll read more about that conversation later, but Michael said many things in his presentation during the event which I would love to see tattooed on the foreheads (in reverse lettering, so they can read it in the mirror) of aspiring producers. (OK, a tattoo is too extreme. I love producers and don't want to mark them for life. Maybe we should just paint it on their mirror.) Among these gems of wisdom:

• don't fall in love with the temps Temp sound effects, music, etc, are all put in the timeline by the picture department for very good reasons, but they shouldn't be confused with finished audio. You should be hiring a composer to improve upon the temp music, not to knock it off. (In fact, that's illegal, but it's also a poor use of a creative opportunity.) Likewise, your sound designer specializes in sound effects and should be able to improve on something which was pulled from the libraries in Soundtrack Pro. 
• good sound sells / bad sound sucks This is so very true, and I could write about it for hours. I'll try not to, though. The real world is a noisy and, frankly, annoying place, sonically speaking. Right now I'm listening to a leaky toilet valve down the hall, the rather loud fan noise of this particular computer, a rather unpleasant-sounding keyboard (it feels fine, but sounds kinda, I don't know, chicklety), and I'm sure the refrigerator will cycle on soon enough. Our brains do a fantastic job of ignoring the sounds we don't want to hear and focusing in on what is important to us in that moment. If you simply put a microphone in a room and play it back in a movie theater, our brains don't have the same auditory cues to go on and it ends up sounding like mud because we can't filter out what we don't want to hear enough to focus on the important stuff. If you deliver your post audio team really crappy production audio, they'll have to spend all their energy and time (and your budget) just to make the dialog understandable without the background noise distracting the audience. If you endeavor to get quality audio on set, your post audio team can focus on making your movie sound great instead of just making it sound tolerable. And here's the bottom line from Michael's presentation: distributors fancy themselves audiophiles and are going to be snobs about mediocre audio long before they'll even comment on your color grading, cinematography, or even acting and writing. If they don't like your audio, it either lowers your chances of them buying, lowers the purchase price they'll offer, or adds a big (and expensive) pile of stipulations to the sale. 
• plan for audio post early You shouldn't be surprised when you finish the edit and realize you know have to shop for a mix. You should know during pre-production roughly how much of your budget you'll need to get allof post production done, including audio post. If you're running over budget in production, you need to consider how you're going to make up for that or the last step of your project will suffer, and audio post is often the last bill you'll pay. The same goes for budgeting time. If production runs long or picture doesn't get locked as quickly as you'd planned, audio post could get squeezed and again you'll pay--either with more money or less quality. (See good sound sells / bad sound sucks above.) Production overruns and delays will happen more often than not, so plan accordingly such that the sound on your picture won't suffer.
• Michael didn't say this in his presentation, but agreed with me afterwards, and many other people hinted at it during the conference: lip sync of production sound is the picture department's responsibility, not the audio post department Ensuring lock sync is easiest done in dailies. Then the picture editor should maintain that sync throughout editorial. The guide track delivered with locked picture should be the bible for sync throughout audio post. Once you start chasing it away from that guide track, you can keep chasing it forever and never feel as though you've found it. We have the skills to reestablish sync on production dialog, but we could be spending more time making your movie sound great if we didn't have to worry about chasing sync.

In short, we really live to make every project we work on sound better. The more time we have, the better we can make it sound.