As sound designers and mixers we struggle to get some level of control; control of our working situations and our tools. The funny thing is, sometimes not precisely controlling the tools we work with can lead to the most interesting results. Often an imprecise tool is exactly what we need. Like this one.

I’ve been doing more and more landscape painting over the last decade or so when I’m not working on movies. I’m not a great painter, but I’ve learned lots of things about it by diving in and giving myself permission to make lots of mistakes, then doing my best to figure out what each mistake can teach me.

This is part of a painting by Paul Cezanne. If you want to appreciate the beauty of a painting it’s rarely a good idea to look at it extremely closely, but that’s what I suggest you do with this one. It’s basically all “mistakes” and “accidents,” but Cezanne curated each one very, very carefully. If you zoom in far enough so that any of these individual apples fills the screen, you wouldn’t even guess you were looking at an apple. It’s just a seemingly random bunch of shapes and colors. But the overall result when you look at the whole thing from a distance is a stylized, beautiful, and compelling Impressionist masterpiece.

So, what’s the lesson here for sound?

I believe it’s best to think of sound design as more of an impressionist art form than one focused on realism. The goal should not be to try to reproduce reality. It should be to offer a twist on reality that expresses a set of emotions helpful to the overall storytelling.

Employing the most precise tools and using them in the most controlled way in every moment isn’t the best way to find those useful twists. Learning how to curate your mistakes and accidents is a better approach.

When I’m working on the sound for a shot of trees blowing in the wind, I never start by adding a sound for each limb moving, one at a time. I find a recording of wind-blown trees, and arbitrarily lay that up to the picture. There will almost always be at least one or two moments where something in the sound speaks to the visuals in a way I could not have matched by cutting each limb separately. Conversely, there will always be visual elements that aren’t covered by the general tree sound. I then try a similar approach, putting another, slightly more focused sound in rough sync with the moment I need to cover. Very often another piece of magic happens, and a sound I wouldn’t have thought to look for will express exactly what I need to express about that moment.

I’ve used this approach with the waves in Cast Away, the bicycle disintegrating in Forrest Gump, Elastigirl stretching in The Incredibles, and the bathroom plumbing going crazy in the Super Mario Bros. Movie.

​A rough brush, applied quickly, then carefully edited. It works!