How Sound Design Impacts Your Wedding Video
/LOOK, LISTEN, FEEL
We’ve always felt that wedding filmmaking is at it’s best when cinematic visuals are combined with professional, thoughtful and intentional sound design and audio mixing. Without the audio, all you really have is moving pictures. A major component of what sets wedding films apart from wedding photos is the ability to hear the sounds and emotions of the day in correlation with the visual imagery. Wedding films with superior audio quality and sound design will make your wedding film so much more emotional immersive. Here’s why...
SOUND SURROUNDS YOU
Sound surrounds you, pulls you in, gives you a sense of space. It’s this pressure and release that pushes through the air and literally envelopes you. Think about the immersive experience when inside a movie theater and feeling the thumbing of the speakers in your chest. It’s a very physical thing — the only part of a visual production that actually touches the audience.
As we design sound for your wedding film, our goal is to re-create what your brain experienced on the wedding day. Most people don’t realize that in the real world, their brain is constantly mixing the audio around them. You hear what you’re looking at, what you’re focusing on. Your brain hears you clinking the champagne glasses with your spouse or friends after a toast, but not white noise conversations occurring in the background. What we try to do in a creative and artificial way with sound design is provide focus and guide your eyes around the screen.
AN EXTENSION OF THE CINEMATOGRAPHER
Sound design is very much an extension of visual cinematography. The job is to focus on what’s important within the frame and blur the edges of the cinematographer’s frame — to set the audience inside of it. Sound design allows a cinematographer to work in an additional dimension. That mind-melding between picture and sound is what we’re always going for. We want to erase all of the borders. The funny thing is, our best work is also our most transparent. The best sound design is oftentimes the sound design nobody notices.
TOOLS OF THE TRADE
The tools we generally work with are dialogue, ambient sound effects, and music. Each of the elements have the ability to support the story in its own way. To give you a good idea of how all these tools and concepts come together, consider the champagne glass example mentioned previously. When the toaster is done speaking, you see and hear champagne glasses clinking and are transported back to the moment of the wedding day. We used the dialogue from the toast, added in the sound effects of the glasses clinking and balanced all that with music in the background to make it feel as if you were there in the room, in that exact moment, all over again.
EMOTIONAL DYNAMICS
We know that we need to create dynamic changes, peaks and valleys, to give the audience moments of rest because doing so will allow the times of intensity through music and sound to be much more impactful. An important part of all of this is allowing our couples to feel what they need to feel. Not overdoing it on the sound side, but also not being afraid to not do anything at all — going without music, going without suggestive sound design, allowing the audience to interpret as they see fit. To us, that’s one of the biggest reasons our wedding films can be so immersive. We want to take our clients on a climatic journey of the wedding day with a multi-sensory approach stimulating the visual and auditory senses.
HOW WE USE SOUND DESIGN FOR YOUR WEDDING FILM
Lead by one of our founding members Jonah, the sound design team at One Story Weddings goes further with sound design than most other wedding film studios ever imagined possible with wedding films. A multilayered approach that brings the sights, sounds and feelings to your wedding day to the forefront of your wedding film collection in a way never thought possible. But you have to hear for yourself to believe it. Click on the link below and turn up the sound (or put on some high quality noise cancelling headphones) to LOOK, LISTEN and FEEL the journey our films take you on.
ONE STORY WEDDINGS SOUND DESIGN SOLUTIONS
Standard Sound Design - Basic Audio leveling and mixing of vocals and music to ensure all voices and soundbites heard clearly and evenly. Very balanced audio mix.
Premium Sound Design - completely immersive surround sound experience that includes balancing of all audio sound bites, music and ambient effects. Adding in ambient sound effects to enhance the realistic feel and emotion of the wedding video to make you feel like you were back at your wedding day all over again.