The Big Think

I came across an excellent short article series here. Among the key thoughts was this one:

Since much of the audio process doesn’t happen until after the cast and crew have gone home, the sound usually isn’t addressed seriously until that point – which can be a big mistake. If you prioritize your audio well and plan for it from early on, you’ll reap all of the rewards of a completed and marketable project. If you underestimate your audio needs you may find that your project never seems to end.

That’s so true. I’m embarking on the mix for Paradise Recovered, the film that took our small team three weeks to shoot last summer, and I’m so glad that the director and producer took audio seriously while on set (in spite of the grumbling from certain other parts of the production crew). There were a few unavoidable compromises made that will take costly and lengthy repair in my post production phase (among them, the necessity to recreate sound during several MOS scenes), but I’ve come across many, many scenes where the director and producer actually listened to the sound dept (a rare thing!) and made the right call. It means that the final film is going to sound that much better. I think the end result will be a film that comes across as being much more professional than it would have if there was a lot of room noise, uncontrolled ambient sounds (airplanes, air conditioners, cicadas), or bad dialog. There’s always a lot of post production work to do on any film – just listen to the audio from the “deleted scenes” from any of the DVD’s you may own- but the more consideration that’s given to production sound, the better the final product. You can always fix stuff in post if you have the budget (redo every bit of audio, loop all the dialog, send out a crew to recreate all the ambient sounds, etc), but just take five minutes on a rushed set to let the sound crew do its job and you’ll reap huge benefits in post, not to mention getting more natural sound because it was actually recorded in the environment that the audience sees.

I sat in the Starbucks just up the street for an hour this morning drinking free Tax Day coffee and creating a big spreadsheet of all the scenes in the film and everything that needs to be mixed in each (dialog edit, ambient edit, foley creation, music, etc). As I typed the scene descriptions I kept remembering how Storme and Andi (the director and producer/writer, respectively) kept balancing the needs of camera and sound on set. I’m sure glad that they listened to me at the time because, not only did it save them thousands of dollars in post production costs, but the final film is going to sound so much better for it. Thanks, Storme and Andi!

I’m excited to get going on the edit. It’s a long, sometimes tedious, painstaking process, but it’s something that I’ve gotten good at it (toots own horn).