Designing A Movie For Sound

Randy Thom wrote in 1999:

The biggest myth about composing and sound designing is that they are about creating great sounds.  Not true, or at least not true enough. 

What is Sound Design? 
You may assume that it’s about fabricating neat sound effects. But that doesn’t describe very accurately what Ben Burtt and Walter Murch, who invented the term, did on "Star Wars" and "Apocalypse Now" respectively.  On those films they found themselves working with Directors who were not just looking for powerful sound effects to attach to a structure that was already in place.  By experimenting with sound, playing with sound (and not just sound effects, but music and dialog as well) all through production and post production what Francis Coppola, Walter Murch, George Lucas, and Ben Burtt found is that sound began to shape the picture sometimes as much as the picture shaped the sound.  The result was very different from  anything we had heard before.  The films are legends, and their soundtracks changed forever the way we think about film sound. 

  What passes for "great sound" in films today is too often merely loud sound.  High fidelity recordings of gunshots and explosions, and well fabricated alien creature vocalizations do not constitute great sound design.  A well-orchestrated and recorded piece of musical score has minimal .....

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