The Meetings Sound Never Attended

We held thirty-one production meetings for Twenty-Fifth Hour. The AI team was there. The game engine team, the camera department, the directing and production departments. I have been going back through the records lately, and the composition never changed once.

My sound designer was not in a single one.

This was not a falling-out. My sound designer

was involved from the script stage, earlier than almost anyone. We talked constantly — about silence, about water drops, about how wide the mix should open and where it should close. Sound motifs were recorded before we shot a frame. If you had asked me at the time whether sound mattered on this film, I would have said it was the thing that mattered most.

And yet.

When we chose the cave, I chose it partly for how it would sound, and I remember being quietly pleased with myself. It has taken me until now to see what that decision actually revealed. Sound had no voice in that room. It had an advocate. Me. And an advocate can only carry what he happens to think of in advance.

I could imagine the reverberation of a cave, because a cave is a space and spaces have echoes. I could not imagine the mechanical hum sitting underneath the LED wall, or the particular emptiness of a generated shot that never had a microphone anywhere near it. Those things do not announce themselves. They surface out of technical detail, in conversations I was in and Ross was not.

The work reached him anyway. It always does.

I used to think that caring about sound early was enough. Now I think there is a difference between being consulted and being in the room where the decision gets made, and that the difference stays invisible until you look at an invitation list.

The mix works. Nothing in it sounds repaired.

That, I have come to think, is exactly the problem.