What a cue is actually for

Ask most people what sound design is for and they will describe scenery. Rain, so you know it is raining. A door, so you know somebody left. Traffic, so you know the flat is on a main road. All of that is true and none of it is the interesting part, because every one of those cues is answering a question the audience was not asking.

Cue-driven storytelling starts somewhere else: with what the audience needs to feel next, and whether sound is the right thing to carry it. Sometimes it is not. A cue that could be replaced by a line of dialogue or a lighting shift is usually a cue that should be, and cutting it is a design decision rather than a failure.

Three things that change when you work this way

The design starts from the script, not from a library. Searching a sound library first is how a show ends up with beautiful cues that do not belong to it. Reading for the beats first means you know what you are looking for before you go looking, and you notice when nothing you find is right, which is when the interesting work starts.

Transitions stop being gaps. A scene change is not dead time to be covered. It is a passage of time the audience has to feel, and the length, texture and decay of what plays across it tells them how much time passed and how they should feel about it. The same eight seconds can read as a night, a year, or an interruption depending on how it is built.

Ambience becomes a point of view. A room does not have one sound: it has the sound the character in it is hearing. Somebody waiting for bad news hears the clock. The same room, ten minutes later, with the news delivered, does not. Building ambience from whose ears we are in is the difference between a location and a scene.

Where this approach is wrong

It is a slower way to work and it is not always worth it. A revue, a panto, a fast comedy: those want cues that land hard and clean, and interrogating each one for narrative purpose will make the show worse. Some productions need scenery and are better for it.

It also does not survive a rushed tech. Cue-driven work depends on hearing cues against performances rather than in isolation, and a schedule that does not allow that will produce a design that is defensible on paper and wrong in the room. Knowing which of the two you are working on is part of the job.

The productions listed under My Work were each built this way, and each one has cues you can listen to.