It’s amazing how meticulous and creative a producer can be when it comes to the visual details of a promotional or campaign video.  Hours…days…weeks spent on lighting, color correction, animated logos and support graphics, transitions and eye candy worthy of The Discovery Channel.  And then he ham-handedly drops in a quick and poorly-chosen music bed, and the entire video suddenly plays like a C-SPAN press conference.

A favorite saying in the game of golf is, “Drive for show, putt for dough.”  In the realm of video production, the soundtrack is the putting green, and it will either make or break your final score.  Yet many producers are so focused on the more dramatic strokes.  They’re so busy doctoring, enhancing and massaging the flashy visual cues to please the eyes, that they ignore the other critical sense organ (the ears) altogether.  Or they simply don’t have a feel for music selection, tempo, editing and mixing, and the apples-and-oranges combo makes the entire piece feel like an unhappy marriage.

What are the consequences of getting the audio wrong?  Conduct this experiment.  Watch a powerful movie trailer (on YouTube or wherever) with 1) no audio and/or 2) a separate and unrelated music selection in the background.  The change in the soundtrack alters the entire video AND your reaction to it.  A visual feast with an audible famine is, in our experience, nearly powerless.

So how does a producer cultivate the bottom part of the timeline…the audio portion?  Start with a good library of resources.  Creative Animation uses higher-end licensed production beds that are probably cost-prohibitive for many individual users, but there are royalty-free production companies out there that can be explored with any Google search.

When editing, ask yourself if the music and sound effects punctuate and enhance the video…or if they distract and remove the viewer from the experience.  Does the audio merely lie underneath a narrator, or does it propel the project forward and provide momentum?   Do your fly-by whooshes and punches enforce or overpower?

Is the soundtrack working as an assistant storyteller, or is it an eleventh hour addition barely considered?

There are entire college degrees for things like sound design.  Creative’s teams have worked for years to sharpen the audible tools, tricks and tracks that take our 3D animations and videos to another level.  As you work with production teams in your own circle, remember that audio is just as critical as video when you’re engaging an audience.  Your soundtrack deserves the time and care required to make the final video truly shine.