Sound Design & Audio Post Production.

Sound design lives in two registers at once: realistic (what the world actually sounds like) and dramatic (what the audience needs to feel). A door slam in a thriller is engineered for emotional impact; a door slam in a documentary is engineered for honesty. We work both ways and tell you which we're choosing for each cue.

Foley is recorded at the studio when the scene wants its own footsteps, cloth and prop layers, and the reason is performance as much as sync. A library footstep is somebody else’s weight, gait and floor; a foley artist watches the actor and walks the way that actor walks, in the shoes that character wears, on the surface the scene is on. That is why it survives the cut when a pasted-in effect does not. Library work covers ambience and the longer beds — we curate from Sound Ideas, Soundly and our own recorded archive so nothing in the final cut is from a free-tier pack everyone else is also using.

Perspective is the part that separates finished work from assembled work. The same door, in a wide shot and in a close-up, is not the same sound: distance changes the direct-to-reverberant ratio and the high end rolls off with it, so an effect cut at one level across both shots tells the audience the camera did not move. Effects get placed for the lens, and reverb is matched to the room the picture says we are in.

Dialogue comes first in the order of work and last in what the audience notices. Production sound arrives with whatever was in the room — traffic, HVAC, a generator — and the fix is to match the whole scene to a consistent noise floor rather than clean one bad line until it sounds like it was recorded somewhere else. Where ADR is needed we coordinate the session and match the original mic and perspective before re-cutting to lip sync; a line recorded clean and close, dropped into a wide exterior, reads as a different film.

⚠️ The M&E version is where sloppy stems get found out. Anything printed onto the dialogue stem — a door, a footstep, a room tone — vanishes the moment a foreign-language distributor replaces that stem, and the scene arrives silent where the door should be. So effects live on the effects stem from the first pass, not as a separate job at the end.

Final delivery is at the target for where it plays — roughly −27 LKFS theatrical, −23 LUFS for European broadcast under EBU R 128, −24 LKFS for US broadcast under ATSC A/85 — with the M&E split so the show can be re-voiced without losing the soundscape.