Unless that's the joke.
Sound is the part of a commercial that clients notice least and feel most. Nobody comes out of a review saying "great foley". They say "it feels expensive" or "something's off". Usually, that's the sound.
Start with the action
Before music, before voice-over, I go through the picture and listen for what should be there. A finger on glass. A plug going into a socket. A door. Water hitting a floor.
Small products need small, precise sounds. Too big and it feels cartoonish. Too quiet and the product feels like a render. Get it right and the product suddenly has weight - you believe it exists.
Rhythm is half the edit
In a 30-second film, sound decides the pace as much as the cuts do. A cut on the beat feels confident. A sound that lands a few frames before the picture creates anticipation. A sound effect can carry you across a cut that would otherwise feel abrupt.
When an edit feels slow and nobody can say why, I'd check the sound before cutting more frames.
Give the voice room
Rad records the voice-over on most of our films, so I'm a bit protective of it. If the music is fighting the voice, people stop following the words. And if they lose the words in a product film, they lose the product.
So the mix makes space: the music pulls back under key lines, busy sound effects stay out of the important sentences, and the most important word in the sentence gets the cleanest moment.
Silence is a sound
A half-second of nothing before the reveal does more than any whoosh. A room that suddenly goes quiet before the water starts dripping tells the story better than music.
Short ads tend to be packed wall to wall. Taking something away is often the strongest move.
Test on the worst speaker
The mix that sounds great in the studio is not the mix people hear. They hear a phone speaker, a laptop, a TV in a noisy kitchen. The low end disappears completely on a phone.
So the last check is always on a phone. If the key sound effect vanishes there, it needs to sit higher in the frequency range. Then a second check with no sound at all - because a lot of people will watch it that way, and the story still has to work.
Sort the music early
Music licences are not something you want to discover a week before launch. Where the film will run, for how long, in which countries - all of that affects which tracks you can use and what they cost. We clear it at the start, together with the creative.
Want a film that sounds as good as it looks? Let's talk.
