WRITTEN BY TESS FOURNIER
SUPERVISING SOUND EDITOR, BOOM BOX POST
The most important part of our job is to make our clients happy. Generally, every talented editor I’ve worked with is more than capable of taking direction from clients’ spotting notes and applying them to their editorial in a successful way. The tricky part comes when clients have notes about changes they would like to make after the first pass of editorial is complete. It’s highly important that we address these notes appropriately so the client knows we’re eager to help support their creative vision.
As editors, we’re very familiar with our own work, having carefully edited and reviewed it many times. But our clients only hear our effects twice: during the preview and during the mix. If we only slightly tweak the designs that our clients note, they’re not going to notice that we made any adjustments at all. It doesn't build a strong relationship with our clients if they think they wasted their time in giving us notes only to have to make the same note again during the mix. That is why we need to make significant changes when a client wants to make adjustments to our editorial. We can’t be subtle about our edit changes and we have to be creative enough to be able to design something entirely different from our first pass. Below are a couple of examples of clients’ notes and how we addressed them.
Spooky Transition:
One of the projects we work on has a recurring magic transition in every episode. We edited in the magic transition we always use, but this particular episode was about Halloween. The client note we received was to add some on-theme sound effects to this transition. Specifically, they asked for something that sounded like those old cheesy haunted house cassettes (if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, Kate made her own version in this blog post.) They mentioned a “werewolf howl, an owl hoot, ravens, etc.” They wanted to make sure we made it spooky and cheesy for little kids, and NOT scary.
Below you can listen to our original edit sans spooky sounds as well as the final version that went to the mix stage.
Whipped Cream:
In another example, one of our editors designed a whipped cream squirt. We received a note from the client asking for an “additional sfx layer for the squirting that's a bit more wet. Not like a fart noise or anything, but... wetter... sillier.” In this case, simply adding a layer as the client suggested would likely not change the sound enough to properly address his note, so we started from scratch. We made the squirt a little more splatty to address the wetness and also added some classic cartoony squish sounds to hopefully make it a little more funny and silly. Below you can hear our original edit vs. our final design.
If you’re new to editorial and want to practice this skill, I challenge you to edit multiple iterations of the same short clip. Try to design each iteration extremely different from the last. This will get you used to being flexible with your editorial and prepare you to address your clients’ notes properly!
If you enjoyed this blog, check out these:
EAR TRAINING ON-THE-GO
DESIGNING CUSTOM SOUND EFFECTS FROM A LIBRARY
RECREATING A MUSICAL TUNE AS A SOUND EFFECT