My name is Darren Will. I'm a senior editor at Casual in the Los Angeles office. I also do sound design and audio mix for lots of our projects.
Audio is a super important part of any video. Ideally, it goes unnoticed, meaning that your attention is not drawn to it. Well-recorded and well-processed audio should feel natural. Bad audio jumps out at you and takes you out of the experience. So we treat it in post to make it warmer, punchier, and more natural.
Sound design is also a very important part of any video. Some videos call for lots of sound design, with environment, accents, and cues, building a punctuation, conveying emotion or mood. And some videos just need a little bit of sound design to drive the message home.
Atmosphere is sound design that's environmental. Are you at a park? Maybe there are birds chirping, a mild breeze, and children playing in the distance. Action sound effects are the sounds that accompany something that's being done on screen. Is a basketball being dribbled? The sound of the ball and the hand makes that feel natural.
Did someone clap? There, that was a sound effect. Accent sound effects accompany things like quick pans, motion graphics, and zooms. The sound mix is the processing of the final picture-locked edit to make each piece of audio sound as good as it can and make all the pieces sound good together, using tools like compression, EQ, and other effects.
The possibilities of what audio can do are as endless as your imagination. You can take a single-shot video and build an environment. Telling a whole story with music and sound. Animations are especially fun to work on because you're building the world from scratch. Anything that's being animated is an opportunity to use a unique sound to accompany it. And since it's not the real world, you get to be extra creative.
Quick, punchy videos like commercials or sizzle reels are especially fun. Like this video we recently made about the five C's of casual.
There's truly an absurd amount of sound effects in that one. That's it on audio; thanks for listening.
