Why Goldilocks Made Boring Choices

Today I was in a mix playback for an upcoming Disney show, and something incredibly normal happened, something that happens at almost every mix playback, and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe we all default to a wrong choice.

One of the final steps in making a movie or television show is what we call the final mix, or the final dub. Music editors like myself aren’t the only sound editors required to make a TV show or a film. There are six general categories of sound:

Production dialogue, which is the sound they record on the set the day they shoot. They use very “directional” microphones and try to only get the sound of the actors speaking.

Sound effects, which are all the sounds of all of the specific objects on screen like cars and guns and doors and spaceships.

Background sounds, which are the environmental sounds that let you know where you are like wind, crickets, humming lightbulbs, basically anything that sets the scene but doesn’t react to specific objects.

ADR, which stands for “automated dialogue replacement,” and is dialogue recorded after the fact by the actors in a recording studio.

Foley, which are all the sounds made by the people on screen with anything other than their mouths like footsteps, hands touching things and picking things up and putting things down, even clothes rustling (pay attention to how loud your clothes are when you move).

And, of course, music. Each one of these categories has its own editor.

The final dub is where all of the editors bring our edited material to a mixing stage, which is basically a small theater, and re-recording mixers mix all of those sounds together to make the final soundtrack of the movie or TV show. At the end of that process, the filmmakers come to the mixing stage and we do a final playback of the mix. The filmmakers give notes, and all of the sound editors and mixers scramble to change the mix to those notes.

So today I was in a playback, and two of the producers had notes about the same sound effect. What might seem odd but is actually really common, one of them thought it was too loud, and one of them thought it was too quiet. So we did what we always do in that situation. We said, “Oh well, if you thought it was too loud and I thought it was too quiet, then it’s probably just right.”

But maybe that’s a mistake.

We have this “Goldilocks principle”: that there exists a perfect balance. Not too hot, not too cold. Not too hard, not too soft. In every situation where we’re trying to weigh two or more options, somewhere in the middle is a perfect balance.

While this may be true for measurable metrics, it is not true for any endeavor which is creative, or hinges on people’s emotional reactions, which I would say is almost every single human endeavor.

For those cases, there is what I call “the range of taste.”

Let’s say the range of acceptable answers to a problem lies on a scale from 0 to 100. Below 0 is a mistake. Above 100 is a mistake. Everything else from 0 to 100 is just taste.

In most endeavors, for most people, our choices cluster around 50. But people actively engaged in positive creative thinking, or people trying to make something new tend to cluster around 25 and 75, rather than at the safe middle. That’s what makes their choices interesting and unexpected.

The obvious answer is the answer that lies at 50 in the range of taste. And that’s not what makes artists artists. That’s not what makes creativity creativity. The most interesting answers will always still lie within the range of taste, but at the edges. The sound effect is probably wrong. It needs to be louder, OR it needs to be quieter. The compromise might be the wrong answer. Louder and quieter might both be right answers.

This is often what makes collaborating hard. Two creative professionals can find themselves in a room discussing a creative decision where one’s taste is a 25 and the other’s is a 75. Both are well within the acceptable range, equidistant from the middle. But they’re so far apart from each other that each one’s taste is 25 points closer to a mistake than it is to their colleague’s.

It’s very hard, in that situation, not to see the other person’s taste as a mistake.

As a music editor, it’s my job to align myself with the taste of the showrunner, the producers, the director, the composer, while still having my own opinions and artistic taste. And let me tell you, it’s a very different job, helping other people realize their artistic vision versus realizing your own.

Sometimes someone’s idea is actually a mistake, a technical mistake, and in those cases, I try to make sure people can realize their ideas without making technical errors. So my job is to have an opinion, and then ultimately do whatever the producer or director wants. My job is to protect them from stepping outside of the bounds of right and wrong, but not to protect them from the giant gap that often exists between my taste and their taste.

I can’t possibly execute in good faith a note from someone whose taste is a 90 when my taste is a 10, unless I can fully internalize the fact that while they are 80 points from what feels right to me, 10 points away from a mistake is well within the acceptable range of taste. And that requires me to try and actually see it from their perspective. I can’t just acknowledge that they like it and I hate it, I have to feel what they like about it. I have to execute the best version of their instincts. I have to deliver like someone who understands the vision. I have to get it.

Always stop and honestly ask yourself: is this a mistake or is this a question of taste? If it’s taste (and it almost always is), then recognize that if you’re good at your job, you’re not anywhere near 50, and they probably aren’t either. That means you’re not wrong, AND they’re not wrong.

It may seem like I’m just asking you to see it from someone’s perspective. It’s not the same as seeing it from someone’s perspective. It’s feeling it from someone else’s perspective. And that’s a lot harder to do.

Fight like hell for your taste, but not until you fully understand why the other person likes what they like about it. It’s not enough just to understand their viewpoint. The secret of true collaboration is understanding the emotions that got them there.