How to Tell a Story With Sound Design

How to Tell a Story With Sound Design

Ever wondered how you can tell a story with sound design? Forever Audio's Sound Engineer and Composer, Luke McPeake spoke to LBBonline - Little Black Book about our approach to creating engaging and immersive audio.

Read what he had to say below, and you can find the full article with other sound professional's thoughts here.

The first step when approaching any sound design project will always be to read the script in full. This will help to give an understanding of the setting, characters and themes for the story you’re trying to help tell, and is key to ensuring that you’re trying to tell the exact same story as everybody else involved. The aim should always be to create a world in which the listener can fully immerse themselves. Consistency is key to making the story believable and authentic, and any sound design should always aim to elevate the story and never be a distraction. Personally, I’ll look to avoid anything that could potentially take the listener out of the moment.

After having a discussion with the other creatives in the process, and once you feel that you have a clear understanding of the tone and vision, you can then plan the approach to the sound design in more detail. The process usually involves breaking down the sound design into categories. This will involve diegetic sounds (ambience and atmospheres), foley and sound effects, and non-diegetic sounds (musical cues). I’ll also always look to plan for continuity in the storytelling, using things such as room layout drawings and their associated reverb treatments as a reference during the process. 

The sound creation itself will often involve layering, and I’ll commonly use a mixture of existing library or pre-recorded sound effects along with self-recorded sounds. This affords much more flexibility, particularly for the more creative sound design elements. 

A good example of this layering technique was my recent work on Audible’s ‘David Copperfield’, where a number of the sounds needed to be created especially for the production, with a focus on authenticity in its Victorian era setting.