I (see References) base my reflections on this topic on experiences from feature films, TV productions, and student projects in Germany. However, I know from numerous international conferences I have attended that my observations are likely similar in other countries, meaning that the issues and solutions discussed here could also be of international interest.
In the current film production process, sound creatives - apart from film music composers - are typically perceived and hired as operators. If one cannot handle the available sound technology, a technician is needed, and one must clearly communicate what needs to be done, which the technician then executes. What is to be implemented is determined by the screenwriter, director, possibly the producer, and editor, but not by the "sound technician." This definition of a sound employee as a technician stems from a tradition in which the core creative team in radio, television, and film consists of the producer, author, and director.
During the filmmaking process, the Director of Photography is accepted as a creative collaborator on an equal level, as is the editor during the editing phase. For decades, sound was edited together with the image at editing tables by the picture editor. Since this process was and remains the most important after the screenplay and shooting, it is customary for the director/producer to be present in the editing room regularly, if not daily. Since editing has become digital, it is not uncommon for directors to edit themselves.
In this process, the moving images are successively cut together, but sound is also already being laid out at this stage: dialogues, voice-over texts, important elements of the sound scene, diegetic and non-diegetic music (temp tracks), and perhaps even voiceovers. Since this sound layout is often produced with qualitatively insufficient, hastily gathered sounds, a sound technician is needed at the end to refine the layout. Whether this technician calls themselves a sound engineer, sound designer, or sound editor is less important to the client; what matters is that they understand the layout, enhance it with usual elements like Foley, atmos, and effects, and ultimately provide good source material for the final mix, which is primarily determined by the director again.
In German film sound studios, the sound designer is usually synonymous with the sound supervisor and sound editor. In their role as sound supervisor, they can oversee and influence the overall post-production process, while as a sound editor, they work on individual tasks described above in collaboration with other sound editor colleagues. Sound designers typically focus on atmospheric, effects, and SFX work in their sound editing activities. I use the different job titles in the following system: The sound editor is a sound cutter who, upon clear assignment, works on one or more sound tasks and delivers them for mixing without a major personal sound concept.
The sound designer is the sound creator who, while working on assignment and in close communication with the director, production, and often the editor, processes multiple sound tasks. For specific tasks (layers), they delegate work to sound editors, requiring specific performances and maintaining close communication. Typically, they take on the core design layers in editing themselves, as they develop a sound concept and implement it consistently after consulting with their clients. They usually participate as a sound editor in the mixing process to represent the sound dramaturgy to the mix engineer and director and to make quick final corrections in the DAW if needed. However, they are rarely the mix engineer for the final mix in German mixing studios.
The Creative Audio Director (Supervising Sound Editor) does not need to work as an editor themselves but is, similar to a composer for film music, the conceptual designer who develops the plan and the narrative sound design in accordance with the screenplay and the current edit. They engage editors, assign them tasks, and organize the entire workflow, technical standards, and communication between departments and individual sound tasks for the most efficient collaboration. At the same time, they must communicate frequently with the director (often also with production) and the composer regarding intermediate results (layouts). Ideally, in the mixing process, they are involved equally with the director and production (sometimes also with editing) in the final decisions on how the editing/sound design they are completely responsible for takes its final form.
The soundtrack composer is traditionally responsible for the harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic passages in the film. Whether they have these performed with instruments, generated electronically themselves, or create a mix of both is their decision and depends solely on the choices made in communication with the director.
Unfortunately, the current state of affairs in Germany is often that sound designers and soundtrack composers are each aware that someone is also working on the soundtrack for the same film in parallel, but they usually do not know what or how!
In smaller productions, the sound designer is both the creative force and coordinator of their collaborating sound editors. This is beneficial for the “creative flow,” but it can quickly become overwhelming when they also have to coordinate external deadlines, monitor technical standards and transfers, and especially face misunderstandings with the editing team or director regarding the technical and workflow necessities for sound post-production.
Unfortunately, especially in Germany, cost pressure is often decisive, which means that a Supervising Sound Editor is rarely appointed, and there is often a lack of a Post-Production Supervisor to organize and coordinate the entire process of image and sound after filming, primarily in logistical and technical terms. The result is that team members must communicate and coordinate directly with each other, often without having clarified hierarchies or technical standards, and emerging problems are then passed on to the producer. Since film professionals often have little understanding of the systems and technical vocabulary of film sound, this frequently leads to situations that waste time and effort and have little to do with creative work. It would therefore be extremely advisable for producers to plan for the appointment of a supervisor, or better yet, a Creative Audio Director, if they are interested in maximizing creativity and ensuring a smooth workflow.
Film sound is such a complex symbiosis of various recordings made at different times and for different purposes that it requires an experienced musique concrète composer or a composing sound designer to structure the material, edit it semantically in terms of storytelling, and instrument it with the right degrees of nuance. If this person is also to be a technical coordinator, a good communicator, and an engaging co-author of the film content, that is asking a lot from a single individual.
Alternatively:
Film sound is such a complex symbiosis of various recordings made at different times and for different purposes that it necessitates a well-communicating, mutually influencing team of specialists to structure the material, edit it semantically in terms of storytelling, and instrument it with the right nuances. Such a team always needs a team leader who has the final say and can mediate - preferably without being "biased" by their own work - and defend decisions to the clients.
I consider both possibilities feasible, and I focus on this in higher education. Both options hold the potential for a cohesive soundtrack. This would be a composition that harmonizes the heterogeneous materials of language, music, and sounds, taking into account their architectural, melodic, and rhythmic values and weights, as well as their semantic effects on the moving image. At the same time, this composition would develop the different keywords, sounds, or musical motifs in horizontally varying combinations and would unfold in a clearly structured, vertically accompanying, associating, or even disassociating or counterpointing disposition for the overall structure of the sound layers and their development in a "musical, tonal language sense."
Following Michel Chion's approach that there is no soundtrack functioning autonomously and independently of the moving image in the context of film, the focus is not only on horizontal logic and coherence but also on the vertical interaction between image and sound in an audio-vision. The central questions become:
What do I see that I also hear, and what do I not hear? And what do I hear that I see, and what do I not see? What do these decisions mean?
A team, no matter how well it functions, always needs a supervisor - someone who makes decisions and takes artistic and creative responsibility. This is comparable to the director within a team of set designers, costume designers, makeup artists, cinematographers, lighting technicians, and actors on set. This audio director should be the most experienced and versatile person on the team, someone who has worked practically in most, if not all, of the foundational five layers.
Incidentally, such a universally experienced "sound master" is the prototype of a sound designer, with the added responsibilities of planning, coordinating, supervising, leading, and communicating, while leaving the practical work entirely to a team of "arrangers" or "interpreters." A sound supervisor (or supervising sound editor) today most closely resembles this type, provided they are not merely equated with the administrative and technical organizer and overseer of sound post-production, as is usually the case. The organizational oversight, budgeting, and communication with production, supplying studios, and further processing specialists should be the responsibility of a post-production manager, while the technical supervision and support should fall to an audio engineer. However, the creative and compositional planning and supervision of the entire sound process should be entrusted to the sound designer or, even better, the Creative Audio Director as described above! I believe that the creative future of film sound design lies in such a type of audio artist. If the composer also works within this team, there is a chance for a "soundtrack" that truly deserves the name and does not result in a collision of two independently produced sound layers during mixing.
It is the task of educational institutions to form such "sound teams" in project work as model cases. It would be advisable for larger film sound studios to create such work structures and facilities and offer them to the film sound market as packages. It should be the responsibility of every producer to organize sound post-production in such a way that these forms of temporal and spatial collaboration are possible. If this is not feasible in physical space, it is no problem today to organize it virtually through cloud sharing of video files and sound stems, and to regularly schedule video conferences to discuss the editing/sound editing and exchange creative ideas and reactions with other participants.
Older film editors often claim that the profession of sound designer/sound editor is actually redundant, since sound was recorded directly by the film editor at the cutting table in the past. After completing the sound-image editing, it used to require only a sound technician to adjust levels, correct asynchronies, and smooth transitions before the re-recording mixer created the final mix with the perfobands. With the ever-evolving differentiation of the sound guild into sound designers, sound editors, production sound mixers and editors, sound synchronization studios, and post-sync studios, plus composers and musicians working separately, the audiovisual crafts have increasingly separated from one another. Only in the last generation, as DAWs have become tools for both sound editors and composers and modern editing software allows for a complex number of sound track layouts, have these crafts started to come back together. However, because the sound process in multi-layered thinking and work has become far more complex than the still predominantly sequential image editing focused on a frame, some sound editors are already engaging in image editing and becoming audiovisual editors with a greater emphasis on image-sound interactions than was previously the case.
As the available technology - specifically software in the form of editing programs or DAWs - has become increasingly complex, it has also become easier to learn and often even intuitive to use due to graphical user interfaces. Consequently, handling these programs no longer requires an extensive technical education of the old kind. Instead of the former 8 to 10 semesters of electrical engineering, sound engineering, image and video technology, etc., which ultimately led to careers as sound engineers or media technicians, other competencies are now in demand.
If we understand the role of the audiovisual supervisor/Creative Audio Director with editing competencies also in image editing correctly, we are ultimately dealing with a co-director who can engage in material development at eye level with the director, writer, and director of photography, while also being the expert who can guide and coordinate an entire team of specialists! It goes without saying that such a person must have thoroughly studied film and all its crafts, dramaturgical concepts, as well as music and sound design, editing, and the relevant technical and logistical knowledge to be not just a technician or operator but a technical, scientific, and creative collaborator for filmmakers.
Older filmmakers are often reluctant to engage in this kind of creative collaboration, as film sound has long been understood solely as a technical service. The hope lies with younger filmmakers who see future filmmaking as teamwork among equals as an opportunity!
The norm for material development (whether for film, video, television, or computer) should be that all key individuals important for plot, image, and sound design come together and collaboratively work on the material long before the project goes into production. If this process, as well as the realization and post-production, is given enough time, there is a chance to create media artworks.
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