DAY 049 – DESIGNING DANGEROUSLY

Effective vs. Ineffective

Effectiveness comes with time and repetition. To wit, I can slap a basic sound design together pretty damn quickly now if I want to. I don’t do that because I want something true and extraordinary and I enjoy the process, but I could deliver you a competent sound design over a weekend.

Stepping back, however, what I’m really talking about is efficiency. A conceptually half-baked slap-dash, overly-hyphenated sound design, even if it suits the production, might be effective for a wide swath of the audience, but I know the deficit, the poverty of true meaning in it. It is like a McMansion: pleasing enough, generic enough, but hollow.

To be truly effective, I have to wrestle, I have to stew. I’m great at stewing. I as creator have to assign meaning. I have to pin it to the ground and name it. And as some of us know from naming a child, a book, a website or anything else we’ve had a hand in creating, the name is everything.