Sound Editing

Spent a few hours with a sound guy doing the sound editing on my short. He had a lot of proposed audio slotted in -- stings and whooshes, background noises, ambient sounds. I spent a couple hours responding to them -- this one I liked, this one is no good, this one needs to be less swishy and more whooshy. And we did some fun little audio gags, like where the film freeze-frames, letting the score slow down to a halt, rather than just cutting out.

What amazes me is that this all took about two hours. Based on his amazing speed while I was in the room with him, I'm going to guess all the sound editing on this film will take up maybe eight hours.

I spent three months building the sound on my student film back in the day, cutting and splicing bits of mag film. Sure, that was a longer film, but man! Just to take the soundtrack-slows-down gag I mentioned -- that we did in about a minute. In my student days I would have had to set up a tape recorder, then played back the soundtrack on another tape player, and then physically slowed it down. Then dub that to mag film. Then splice it in. And if that didn't work, doing it again.

I'm feeling very good about the film. Some of the sound problems I thought were going to be serious just went away. ("Oh yeah, the bar upstairs was only on the boom mike track, not the wireless mikes. So we just used the wireless mikes.") While sound guys are always bitching that directors ignore their complaints on set ("we'll fix it in post"), my impression is that I could have ignored our sound guy a little more. He was doing a better job than he realized.

Tomorrow we're going into the mix. End of the day, our film is ... done!

UPDATE:

Q. And then what?

Then we take it to a billion festivals. And air it on Bravo in Canada. And see if any networks in the States want it.

Eventually it will hopefully wind up on Moviola, or some other paying short film venue on the Net. And y'all can see it!