August 4, 2025 • 59 mins
Welcome back, Rebels! In this episode of Low-Budget Rebels, we’re diving into a part of filmmaking that’s often overlooked but absolutely essential — sound design. From capturing clean dialogue on set to mixing score and building tension through sound, this week’s guests share how they approach audio on tight schedules and tighter budgets.
First up, I talk with Spooky Madison about building strong communication with your sound team and being aware of audio issues before they become problems. We also discuss what it’s like to mix and master your own projects early on, and how that DIY mindset can give you more control and creative freedom.
Next, I’m joined by Alex Kahuam, who breaks down how he captured clean audio during the intense, one-take production of Failure. We also dig into the role of score in storytelling, and how music can shape the emotional rhythm of a film when used with intention.
Then I sit down with Dillon Brown to talk about sound design in found footage horror. Dillon shares how using directional audio and tonal shifts can heighten scares, build tension, and sell the realism of a scene — especially when you’re working with minimal visual effects or coverage.
Finally, I wrap the episode with Michael Pierro, director of Self Driver. We talk about the importance of planning ahead to capture usable sound in tight locations and fast shoots, as well as the creative side of post — including recording foley and maintaining consistency across a film’s soundscape.
This episode touches on everything from prepping for sound on set to mixing score, creating tone, and layering foley, showing how much audio influences the final product — and how indie filmmakers can use sound to elevate their work, even on a budget.
Thank you so much for supporting Low-Budget Rebels.Your support helps keep the show going and gives you access to these episodes completely ad-free. If you’re not already a member, head to patreon.com/flushstudios to join. And be sure to follow and support this episode’s amazing guests:
Cheers,
Josh
First up, I talk with Spooky Madison about building strong communication with your sound team and being aware of audio issues before they become problems. We also discuss what it’s like to mix and master your own projects early on, and how that DIY mindset can give you more control and creative freedom.
Next, I’m joined by Alex Kahuam, who breaks down how he captured clean audio during the intense, one-take production of Failure. We also dig into the role of score in storytelling, and how music can shape the emotional rhythm of a film when used with intention.
Then I sit down with Dillon Brown to talk about sound design in found footage horror. Dillon shares how using directional audio and tonal shifts can heighten scares, build tension, and sell the realism of a scene — especially when you’re working with minimal visual effects or coverage.
Finally, I wrap the episode with Michael Pierro, director of Self Driver. We talk about the importance of planning ahead to capture usable sound in tight locations and fast shoots, as well as the creative side of post — including recording foley and maintaining consistency across a film’s soundscape.
This episode touches on everything from prepping for sound on set to mixing score, creating tone, and layering foley, showing how much audio influences the final product — and how indie filmmakers can use sound to elevate their work, even on a budget.
Thank you so much for supporting Low-Budget Rebels.Your support helps keep the show going and gives you access to these episodes completely ad-free. If you’re not already a member, head to patreon.com/flushstudios to join. And be sure to follow and support this episode’s amazing guests:
- Alex Kahuam – kahuamfilms.com | @alexkahuam
- Spooky Madison – @finalghoulfilms | Final Ghoul on YouTube
- Dillon Brown – @horrornerdproductions | Films on Tubi and Amazon
- Michael Pierro – @m_pierro
Cheers,
Josh
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more
amazing filmmaking and screenwriting podcasts, just go to ifhpodcastnetwork dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Low Budget and Rebels.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
Cast.
Speaker 4 (00:27):
Welcome to another episode of Low Budget Rebels Season six.
I am so pumped about this episode because it is
such a fascinating topic and when you break down the
elements that go into making a low budget film, one
of the first things that falls apart, and you see
(00:49):
it so often, You've seen it in my movies. It
is an incredible struggle is the sound. Whether that's getting
sound on set, finding ways to improve your sound design,
saving your movie with score. All of these things are
elements of creating a low budget film that are so
(01:11):
absolutely challenging because sound is the last thing we think about,
and it's the first thing we should be thinking about,
they say, and everyone in this episode basically says it
that bad sound design will ruin a movie. The audience
will forgive visuals that are maybe used in a way
that maybe looks like it conveys artistic expression, but generally,
(01:34):
you know, it's because we're making independent films and we
don't have the gear that some of the bigger productions have.
But with sound design. The audience will struggle to forgive
and forget. They'll notice it, and it's something that you
maybe at first don't even realize, but as the movie progresses,
you notice it more and more so. Finding ways through
(01:57):
the artists who have done it, the people who have
come before us. That's how I have, over the years
learned to try to get the best sound. And one
of the tricks that I've learned is to layer sounds
in incredible amounts while I'm in the mix, making sure
that the person who's mixing, or if I'm mixing it myself,
that I'm layering tiny details. Now, nothing drives me more
(02:19):
crazy than too many footsteps or sound design that becomes overbearing.
But if you can layer sounds and find a way
to make your movie pop with the sound design, use
the sound design as a character and properly portray the
emotion of the moment you score. To fill those beats
(02:41):
where maybe the sound design is lacking, and find tricks
that will help you get rid of hums, whether that
is you know, the airplane sound of sounds, or car
sounds or an ac running, any of those things that
you can do to help or utilizing adr Uh, making
sure that you build that into your schedule and into
(03:03):
your budget and into the time that you have to
make your movie. Those things can go a long ways.
I remember Robert Rodriguez on Rebel without a Crew talk
to us about getting adr while we were in the moment,
and it's something that I just straight up didn't have
the time to do. And I always regretted not doing
it because I think it would have really helped had
(03:25):
I had the cast and crew just read through the
script while I was there. Now, I did do that
for a couple of sequences, and the biggest issue just
became simply that I didn't have time to go through
it and fix it all. And I had someone doing
sound design who screwed the pooch a bit and wasn't
able to actually get the sound to where I wanted it,
(03:46):
and I had to fix it myself last minute. But
there are elements to being on set and knowing what
you're able to utilize in that moment that will help
you improve your sound, really paying attention to it. Spooky
Madison describes exactly that they're the director behind the upcoming
Fiberburn and What's Wrong Wendy, And there's an element in
(04:10):
this conversation about trust with your crew and knowing that
your sound mixer and the person running your audio in
the moment are going to be honest with you and
make sure that you're getting the best sound the moment
that you say camera rolling, sound speeding, the sound speeding
is a trust that comes between the director and the
(04:33):
sound person in that moment, and Spooky discusses exactly that.
When you're directing or producing and you're on set, how
conscious of the sound are you? Because I know a
lot of filmmakers who just like sound person, you take it,
set it and forget it thing. And I've had so
many bad experiences that the sound is like one of
(04:53):
those things that I'm always thinking about now It's number
two in the back of my head behind performance.
Speaker 5 (05:00):
I am very conscious of sound. I work with the
sound girl, her name's Andrea Lowe almost in every single
film that I do.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
Awesome.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
That's a relationship that needs I have learned is one
of the most important relationsships in indie filmmaking is having
a sound person you trust and knows how to communicate
what's happening.
Speaker 5 (05:20):
Absolutely, and Columbus, Ohio is just full of amazing sound people.
We really do have a really great network of sound people,
sound mixers, and boom mops. But with Andrea, it's become
second nature to like wait for her permission to start shooting. Like,
(05:40):
as the director, I'm waiting for my sound person's permission
because I don't want to plane fucking up the shoot,
you know.
Speaker 4 (05:46):
Oh yeah, when I hear that sound speed, when someone
says sound speeding, like I'm that's when I'm just like, okay,
we're now, We're good to go.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (05:54):
Yeah, I think that that little trio of you know,
camera rolls, sound speed the order of things right there.
You know, I think that sound is really important. You
can get away with some really artsy, badly shot movies,
but if your sound sucks, then it's not good.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
Have you found anything specific while doing the mix or
in the process of filming, any like little tidbits you've
learned help get the sound design the sound mix that
you're looking for.
Speaker 5 (06:24):
Yeah, I kind of know when I'm writing the script
what challenges we might encounter, like on the day of
the shoot. So I'm really I mean, I'm really relying
on my sound mixer and my boom operator to make
sure that you know, cars aren't driving by, and you
(06:45):
just have to have a really good mixer who knows
how to reduce, you know, like denoising the the whole
track if needed before you have to edit with it.
Andrea is a sound mixer and she always offers, you know,
She's like, just let me know if you need me
to clean it up, I'll clean it up for you.
But as an editor, I'm always like, you know, exploring
new ways to do it myself because I overwork myself constantly.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
But do you do a lot of sound stuff in
the edit? If when you're editing, do you actually like
because I find that without certain sounds, without certain tonal values,
I can't feel the movie.
Speaker 5 (07:19):
Oh yeah, I always edit to tones, sounds on beyond
any type, like different types of room tones. I'm always
editing with some type of sound because that's really how
it's going to help the flow of my scene when
I'm editing, but also it's going to help my score
guy know what I was going for and create something similar.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
You mentioned sound, knowing when you're writing where issues may be,
where there may be problematic tones or you know, car noises,
whatever the thing is. Is sound a big part of
your writing process.
Speaker 5 (07:56):
Oh yeah, oh yeah, I realized how much in the
table for Wendy when uh there's a lot of italic
sized like clangs or you know, like it's like ding
the convenience store door opens. You know, it's like a
sound is very prevalent. In my scripts. I used a
lot of squelch and when.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
Squelch is a great one, Oh yes, love it. So
in how picky are you in the mix? I asked
this because like when I'm doing when I'm editing a
project and i send it to a sound mixer and
I'm sitting with them going through it, I have found
that I'm incredibly picky.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
Uh So, I have mixed all of my movies right myself.
In post I've had a boom Hop on set, but
in posts, I'm usually I have mixed them all. And
then for Wendy, I have both a mixer now and
a boom mop to kind of take all the slack
from me. But I am I'm incredibly picky because I
(09:03):
don't like it when people overcompensate, like the d noise
effects in Premiere Yeah right, and then because they think
that it's like clearing out all the empty space into nothingness,
and I just it just sounds like everyone's underwater. I
am incredibly picky. So that's why I do them myself,
because I want to make sure that I'm not that
(09:23):
I am performing at my own high standards, you know.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
So how do you go about actually putting your sound together?
Speaker 5 (09:31):
Then?
Speaker 4 (09:31):
Do you do your own? Do you do ADR? Do
you do your own sound effects?
Speaker 5 (09:36):
ADR? Especially a lot of folly. Fully is so fun.
I love doing.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
It's such a blast. People who don't do fully, I'm
just like, you're missing out on one of the most
fun things in the filmmaking process.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (09:48):
Yeah, all the wet sounds you can get and all
like the just the stuff you can play with with
different fruits, and yeah, I think it's great. So I
do a lot of ADR.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I do a lot of FOLLY.
Speaker 5 (09:59):
I have a subscription to pixe BA, so I get
like a lot of stock stuff and it's all about
layering that and making and sometimes making it a totally
new sound with a bunch of different.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Sounds in the sound design. And while you're trying to
put together your movie, being able to have that creativity
to think outside the box and decipher what the tonal
value should be, what the sound effects should be, what
the sound is. Sometimes that's the most enjoyable part. Spooky
(10:33):
brought up, you know, fruit squelching sound effects and the
different kind of processes you can use to get fun
folly in your film. That has been an incredible experience
for me. In my short film The First of November,
I used all sorts of different peppers and celery and
vegetables to make crunching sounds, and fruits to make the squishing,
(10:56):
and actually had a pumpkin that I crushed, and I
found it so enjoyable to be able to take that
moment in my filmmaking process and actually enjoy creating the sounds.
And like Spooky said, sometimes you can find a completely
different sound or mix a couple of weird sound effects
together that you would never think would work, but they will.
(11:19):
It's all about tricking the audience into believing that's the
sound they're hearing. And it's an underutil it's not underutilized.
I think you know a lot of the independent filmmakers
I talk to, they love doing this. But it becomes
one of those things where you can spend hours and
hours and hours working on it and eventually you feel
(11:39):
like you just have to get the product out there
and get the movie shown. But having that sort of
fun with Adr and with Foley can be one of
the most enjoyable parts of the process. I can't tell
you how many times I've been on set or been
listening to the audio after we filmed and found noises
(12:02):
and found tones buried in between takes or in little
moments that I never would have thought of. And you know,
like on set, I never would have thought this sound
effect could be used here. But just thinking outside of
the box can help you find tones. And every movie
is its own audio experience. And I'm gonna be talking
(12:23):
next with Alex Kuwalm, who directed the movie Forgiveness and
the recent film Failure, which are he does incredibly long
takes in these movies. Failure is essentially one long take
of a movie, and you can instantly start to think
how challenging sound design must be on a project like that,
because it's not as simple as just getting the tone.
(12:47):
You've got to have Mike set up in proper locations,
and like he talks about, you got to use your
lava leers properly. And the love can come in so
handy while working on Get That Dick, I tried to
use loves as much as I could, and I found
that the LAVs actually were able to help me gain
a room tone and other noises that I didn't expect
(13:08):
to get. Even the sound of a shirt rustling in
the Love could end up being used in other parts
where I needed just a hint of tonal value when
someone was moving. So being able to take pieces of
audio and move it around. That's one of the benefits
of getting as much sound as you can on set
as possible, and I recommend getting as much sound as
(13:31):
you can get on set as possible. Don't be stingy
with the sounds. If you have multiple mics, run them.
Don't be afraid to have more sound than you might
think you need, because when you get into the edit
or when your editor starts working on it, they can
always just mute those tracks, disable them, get rid of them.
But having them is imperative to actually knowing you have
(13:56):
everything you need. It's just like footage. You need to
have the shot, you need to have the audio, and yes,
you can get it in ADR, and you can fix
it with folly, and you can do all these things.
But if you get it in the moment. It can
just add value to what you did that day on set.
So next up, I'm talking to Alex Kuwalm and it's
exciting to hear him talk about the tricks that he
(14:16):
used in making a movie that is a single take,
and I think some of this advice can be used
on anyone's independent film. This movie is unique in the
fact that you have to work in parameters technically that
a lot of people don't have to with failure. I'll
set up my shot, I'll figure out visually what I
(14:37):
want it to be, and then I kind of build
things around it. So I'm just like, here is the angle,
Here is where the camera's going to be. Then I
build my lighting around that. Then I build where's my
shotgun mic going to be, where my love is going
to be, How I'm gonna set up sound? And that's
where I'm leading with. This is the sound on this movie.
I'm it's incredibly well done, and I think one of
(14:59):
the things that I there's a bunch of things I
appreciate about it, But I want you to speak to like,
how did you go about doing sound design on this
and directing from pre production? Figuring out how you're going
to do it all the way to the final movie.
How did sound work?
Speaker 6 (15:15):
So that's a great question because sound is a very
you know, it's very important for every movie. But for
this movie, since there's no room for a boom, there's
no boom in this movie, like at all. So that
was the conversation I had with the sound team, and
I'm like, guys, like, there's no way someone can follow
the camera, So what are we going to do?
Speaker 3 (15:34):
So what we did is like we put a lot
of lavaliers throughout the house.
Speaker 6 (15:38):
A lot of hidden microphones, so in the closet, in
the living room, the basement, like all all the areas.
But also the actors were wearing levelers. The only thing
is due to budget restrictions in the again, we had
to I think we had like eight lavliers pert like
with the cast. So there's a moment where we have
(16:01):
like all the lava layers are BC and then we're
gonna have new actors going in on the next scene.
So when they exited, you know, the house, they had
to take off the lavalers and and.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
They put it to the other actors.
Speaker 6 (16:17):
Dude, and you know, I'm not thinking about this because
that's the sound work. Yeah, right, right, right, But we
talk about it and I'm like, I trust them. I mean,
I'm sure they're gonna have nailed it and everything. So
they're like Alex every time I say God, They're like, oh, amazing.
We were able to do it, dude, like we so
they were very excited to do it. But yeah, we
had the Lavalaer situation in the house with the actors.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
We had more budget.
Speaker 6 (16:40):
We can mike everybody, but we just didn't have that resources.
But anyways, it worked out, and in sound design it
was awesome because like there's no cheating, there's no way
to like, oh, I'm turning to behind me and then
there's something else happening, right. Like, the sound design was
very like organic, so it was kind of like, Okay,
we got to make sure that the phone calls and
(17:02):
the folly and what's happening everything feels like like.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
Life like gets there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, gets there.
Speaker 6 (17:08):
So the sound designer hell that which we've been working
for now twelve years, she's actually doing now the remedy
with her team. It was that, Okay, we got to
make sure this feels organic, but also like it doesn't
feel artificial. Or it doesn't feel like too much, and
she got it. It was awesome, man, because the sound
was so well on set that we only had to
(17:29):
record out of the eighty seven minutes like two pages.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
Of ADR, which is nothing.
Speaker 7 (17:34):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
And when I say two pages of all the.
Speaker 6 (17:36):
Cast like Ted Crazy, you know, Daniel, everybody. So I
was like, Wow, the sound guys did a very good
job because we didn't have to record. It was like
a less than an hour session. So yeah, I mean
the sound guys were amazing. I mean I'm working with
them ever and ever ever again, Like I love them.
So yeah, those guys are killers. They're great, They're awesome.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:01):
So that's I think that there's something there to be
said about the fact that one of my biggest pet
peeves is when the sound design is too much. And
with a movie like this, that would be very easy
to do. It would be super easy to have every
footsteps sound very loud. Footsteps are my biggest pet peeve,
(18:21):
Like I just oh, I hate the folly when it's
just like no one when you are listening in real life,
you don't hear people walking, so when you like, maybe
that would be the actual tone in the room. But
I don't care. I don't want to hear the reality
of it because you're just pulling my focus out of
the movie. It's it's you know, like when a movie's
(18:44):
focus isn't enough or it's too much, I get pulled
out of the movie because what I want to see
from the camera is what my eye sees, what my
focus is, That's what I want. And so when you
have a movie like, uh, you know, Zack Snyder right
now is doing the crazy fucking deep focus, I get
pulled out of the movie.
Speaker 5 (19:02):
Now.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
It's visually sometimes kind of cool, and I can be
like that's a cool shot. That's a cool shot, but
I'm never completely pulled in because of the fact that like,
my eye doesn't see that way. And the same thing
goes for folly. I think people overdo it, and with
a movie like this could be overdone in those sound
in those sound design sessions, was that like a conversation
that was had, like let's bring that down, bring that up?
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (19:23):
No, absolutely, there's and and I agree with you. There's
a lot of movies that you watch and it's like, okay,
I mean they it's in purpose, you know, it's too
much because they want that for the audience. But on
this one, yeah, we role was that and when we
were when Kila was showing me like, hey, this is
the first you know pass on the folly, Listen, let
me know what you think it was, it was cool
(19:44):
because you know she she knows me now very well
for almost, like I said, like twelve years, so it's
kind of like now I don't have to tell her
because she knows what I like.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
And the folly was great.
Speaker 6 (19:56):
Since the first pass, I was like, okay, it's organic,
it's not truly does and feel like too much.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
And then the other artists, which is part of her team,
she was like.
Speaker 6 (20:05):
Okay, if you need less, I can go less or
more and more. But I was like, no, I mean
it sounds pretty good. And then on the mix, of
course we're gonna go up and down. But no, man
like they they were also un they're wonderful, and it
was a thing that they know me. They know me
one hundred percent what I like and uh, it's when
you find those collaborators makes your life so much easier.
(20:27):
And it's just like the rule of thumb is this,
you know, it has to feel organic, that's yeah. If
it doesn't feel organic. I'm not interested. We're gonna have
to redo it so they know that, and then okay
we go from there. But no, it was it was
very cool and and and also with the with the
composer because the composer, I wanted wood wood instruments because
the whole house is made of wood, brilliant, So it
(20:50):
was like, okay, let's let's I want the audience to
feel like in the house entirely.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
At what point did you go, I want wood instruments.
Was that like a concept you had, because this is
something as I'm working on my new movie. I'm working
with a brand new composer and we're not even in
production yet, and I'm already talking to him about like
themes instrumentation where I want the score to go, because
I feel like if I can hit that early on,
even before we go into production and I have a
(21:14):
couple of themes to work with, it will inspire the
feeling of the movie. If I can show my cast
like this is the feeling, like listen to it. That's
such a it's such a pivotal part of any movie.
Is that sound? What is the tonal value of or
what's the tonal theme of this movie, and that's been
(21:35):
a big part of his instrumentation. So the wood element,
the woodwind instrument element is such a brilliant thing because
of that room.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
Yeah, no, I agree.
Speaker 6 (21:44):
If you can give them a piece of white, this
is like the environment that I'm visualizing, I think that's
great for failure. We didn't we didn't plant it before
the shoot. It was more so like the more we
were shooting, it was like, Okay, we're surrounded by wood.
And then it was like, hey, man, like, would you
mind just just you know, using wood instruments. And then
(22:05):
when he saw the movie, he's like, it makes total sense.
Speaker 4 (22:08):
Let's just do what that's it, And it just was
this composer someone you've worked with before. Is this your
normal composer?
Speaker 6 (22:15):
No, No, this is a so vincent is I mean
he's been around for he's like sixty eight, so he's
been around for quite a long time.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
But now this is the first time I work with him.
He's great, and.
Speaker 6 (22:27):
It was we have the same taste. So it's funny
like when when you talk to composers about movies and scores,
if you have that click of like, okay, this is
the taste, and then they replied, oh, yeah, yeah, this
is direct. It's okay, great, so then they know exactly
what you want. Uh So he fell in love with
the film, like even he saw a super role. Like
I literally I show him the film with no sound,
(22:48):
no nothing. I was like, this is you know, because
usually that's how it looks, but it's the look and
he loved it. He's like, dude, if we can elevate
it with the with the instruments and then with the
with your sound is so yeah, he's he loves the film.
He's very proud of the film, and that.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
Should be The score is fantastic. But I think that
that's fascinating. I like the fact that you've made the
point of with sound and score this movie, you work
with someone new, you work with people you've worked with before,
you've worked with the sound designer that you've worked with
for twelve years or whatever. You said, like building these
relationships but also letting new people in it. Just there's
(23:25):
this element of that's how that's the best way in
my opinion, to continue to make movies. After you've made
your first low budget or your second low budget or whatever,
and you're trying to build up to the next movie
the next level. Bringing some of those people back but
then also letting new people in is so it's like
a key. No, it's a trick. It's literally a scam
(23:46):
that we get to pull.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Yeah, it's fresh.
Speaker 6 (23:48):
It's like they bring fresh things to the table because
you know you're used to like days in that and
then they bring like this fresh alias and it's like, oh,
oh this is good. Like, for example, for the Remedy,
I'm working with these other and it's not like Vincent
can't do it. It's just the composer that I'm using
for the remedy he.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
Only does horror. He only does horror, and I needed
a horror fan like I needed that.
Speaker 5 (24:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
Yeah, it's a totally different sound, different sound.
Speaker 6 (24:14):
So yeah, I know he watched the remedy and he's like,
oh my, I love it. This is gonna be my
bead score. So he got very palmed, very excited. And yeah,
I mean the music that he does like you're scared,
you know, it's like oh shit, you know, like it's
very scary his music.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
So I love it. It was a perfect match. I
will work with Vincent again, but for the Remedy, it's
like I needed a horror horror fan.
Speaker 5 (24:36):
You know.
Speaker 4 (24:37):
You know, one of the things I really liked about
the score in Failure is the fact that it did
build the tension, but it also because it was woodwind,
it had this like soothing element to it where it
was almost like it made me calm as I was
watching everything at certain points, And I think that that's
a really smart move versus doing the like strings where
(25:00):
you could have easily just done tension. Just I could
see that playing through the whole thing as well. And
it's a completely different movie, a completely different style of
tension then. And I appreciate the fact that you that
you had this would win and this kind of like
relaxed tone because it made me feel like it made
me continue to want to watch the movie because I
(25:22):
was very relaxed through it even though it was very
tense situations.
Speaker 6 (25:26):
Yeah, that's that's a conversation that we wanted, you know,
with you know, Vincent and Ice, like, okay, in this
part it's like a thriller, but also like to keep
the audience guessing and to keep the audience in this wooden,
you know house environment that they're it's kind of like calm.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
As you were saying, because it is stressful.
Speaker 6 (25:43):
There's there's parts of the film that you were like, ash,
you know, what's gonna happen here, and it's not crazy.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
So I always like to, you know.
Speaker 6 (25:50):
To make different things like, for example, in other projects,
I like to have like super peaceful music with a
lot of violence, you know, and I mean you seen
it with forgiveness, yeah, And then it's the opposite. It's
kind of like there's like a stress and balance, and
I like to mix it with like peace or more
calm music.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
So I like to go to those like balances.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
Not only was Alex full of technical ideas and advice
for how to actually make a project like that work,
and I believe that's something that people can utilize on
any sort of independent film, making sure that they have audio,
the ability to record audio in different places and in
(26:37):
different ways to be able to get full room tones
and all of these different sounds. But also the way
he talks about balance in the score and in the audio.
I think that that's an under not underappreciated, but it's
something we don't always think about when we're in the
process of putting together our soundscape for the film. It's
often just like what is the tent When can we
(26:59):
hit the tension if you're making a horror movie, or
what's going to be the sweetest sound score wise, or
the best tone or whatever. But the reality is is
there's this ebb and flow of music that is necessary
to pull together the movie in a way that forces
(27:20):
the audience to feel multiple emotions, not just one, and
that there's in one scene you can invoke multiple feelings,
even if that's using silence or using a very minor tone,
something that just elevates the emotion of what we're seeing.
(27:41):
On my new movie, Get That Dick, there was a
scene that was very by the numbers conversational when I
wrote it. In my head, like I talked to Spooky
about I'm thinking about the sound and the tones as
I'm editing and as I'm writing, and while I was
writing the scene, I just imagined it being a conversation.
(28:02):
But as I got into the edit, I noticed that
if I gave it a sweet tone in the background,
but gave it some minor chords, if the score itself
was very, very minimal but utilized minor chords, I couldn't
I could make the scene have more emotion than I
(28:22):
initially intended, and it made me enjoy the scene more.
And then watching it with the few people I've showed
it to so far, they it hits. It resonates that
it is an emotional moment between these two characters, even
though on paper it might just read like a simple conversation.
I think that's really important. Finding those balances and those
ups and downs is one of the ways we can
(28:46):
actually invoke an emotion that maybe wasn't necessarily there on
the page. Up next, I'm talking to Dylan Brown and
speaking of balance, we talked about his movie, his found
footage movie, Tahoe Joe, and obviously the found footage movie
you're going to be doing a very different style of
sound design, but it is still about finding a balance
(29:06):
of how do I explain to the audience what they
need to be feeling through sound design, the distance of
the monster to the people, or the tonal value of
the woods in the moment. And something I noticed on
Greywood's plot, even little things that I think a lot
of people take for granted. If you're in a room
(29:27):
and you're sitting with two characters, you're naturally going to think, well,
I don't need outdoor noises. I don't need tones that
we wouldn't hear in a room. But the reality is
is you still hear in those tones even if you're
in a room, And it can make the difference between
making your film feel low budget and making it not.
If I'm being honest, like, I have seen plenty of
(29:49):
low budget movies where just the addition of cricket sounds
distant in the background during a night sequence that's taking
place inside can help elevate that movie, or the sound
design of a city as we're sitting near a window.
Those small details, even if they're just barely noticeable, maybe
(30:09):
you don't even notice them, just subconsciously you feel them,
can make a world of difference. So Dylan Brown talks
about Tahoe Joe and his kind of experimental film The
Summer We Died, and how sound design played into those films,
especially with found footage and experimental stuff. When you're in
(30:31):
production and then when you get into post production, what
is the process like and where is your mind through
that process?
Speaker 8 (30:38):
Yeah, you know, I have I've fallen into the trap
of having rough sound stuff because with found footage, we
usually try to go directional sound just because it's like that's.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
The most, that's what yep, yeah, you know.
Speaker 8 (30:52):
And then I'll just flat admit I don't have the
crew to have like a sound person. Many times I
am my cameraman and director and special effects guy, and
so sometimes it's just let's hope the road that's on
the camera picks up what I need and all ady
r later if I have to. But what I always
try to do with sound as far as like in
(31:13):
the post, is I learned that layering sounds is like
an absolute must. Like I'm doing a headstop, it's gotta
be like nine different sounds.
Speaker 4 (31:22):
Exactly right, dude, exactly right.
Speaker 8 (31:24):
Yeah, And and I can pick up now when movies
do just like a one sound and they go, oh,
that's good. That's there's a slow throat slash, and it's
just like a it's a hollow layer to me, And
I'm like, no, if I'm gonna do a throat slash,
I'm gonna be like in my microphone like tearing a
steake apart. And then I'm gonna get a throat slash
from somewhere online that's cool. And then I'm gonna get
(31:46):
a hilarious like sword sheath sound that would never actually
make that real sound, but you got to have it
in there for the movie. And so I'm all about layers,
like that's my big thing is layers, and then just experimenting.
Most of Tahoe Joe's sounds were actually my one year
old at the time, cooing into the microphone and I
(32:06):
slowed it way down, and that's most of the bigfoot
noise is the baby.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
Actually, that's amazing.
Speaker 4 (32:12):
I love that you use the knife the sheath sound
effect as an example. I use the animation whoosh sound
like everything moves with a whoosh. I put that in movies.
It's at like negative thirty five decibels. It's so quiet
you could barely tell it's there, but it's just enough
to make you know. Same with footsteps. You know, you
(32:33):
can easily grab a footstep off of audio blocks or
wherever the fucking throw it in there, but there's something
about like the actual layering of just the tiniest bit
of noise. So feet steps, I keep them so quiet,
they're barely there, and there's like four layers of foot
and creaking of floor and everything, but you would never
(32:53):
even notice it.
Speaker 8 (32:55):
I mean, I felt like if we were gonna do
like a creature in the woods thing. There is no
way anybody would believe that something's breathing or growling out
there if it doesn't sound like it's far away, if
it's moving around, it's gotta be echo.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Wee.
Speaker 8 (33:12):
There's gotta trees and things in the way, Like there's
there's so many other sounds in the forest that would
mix with that. So like when we did Tahoe Joe,
we were out at night in the woods. We actually
just set the camera up and just filmed. I think
I filmed for like three or four minutes just to
get you know, sound, just to see what's the natural
sounds out here. And then I had like light wind sounds,
(33:36):
I had wind through the trees. We had birds and crickets.
And then when we finally did the bigfoot stuff, Yeah,
it's like that was like an almost an afterthought and
it's there and it's there to be creepy, but to me,
it was like he has to feel distant in the darkness.
He can't feel like he's like always right in front
(33:57):
of the camera because it just the effect is not
to be pulled off, right if there's not depth to
the sound. And it was just through experimentation. I have
no background in any of that stuff, but it was like,
if I can hear it naturally. And this is another
thing I do with sound that maybe like completely off
the wall, but I tend to do all of my
(34:19):
sound effects stuff with just my ears and no headphones
at first, because I want to see what are my
ears gonna hear if I'm watching it on TV, That's
how I'm gonna pick it up, not necessarily through headphones,
So let me hear it this way first, and then
I'll put on headphones and start playing with stuff. But
I usually do like a natural kind of adjustment first,
(34:39):
just to see like what's comfortable for me before I
start even putting headphones in.
Speaker 4 (34:44):
Wow, that is fascinating. I have never tried that, but
it's an interesting concept. It's similar to the I do
a test after I film every movie where I listen
to it, like or after I finish the like rough cut,
where I don't watch it. I just listen and I'm like,
if there's something that feels off in the audio, it
probably feels off in the edit. And it's simple. It's
a similar like going into its sort of blind, going
(35:05):
into like audio blind from the headphones taking naturally what's
coming in.
Speaker 8 (35:10):
Yeah, yeah, it just helped me, I think, because I
felt like, if it's if it's glaringly obvious, out of
whack to my ears, it's gonna be amplified a hundred
times in the headphones, so you know, and then sometimes
I run into where it's just like I'm screwed. The
audio we captured is not great. Yes, I don't know
what I'm gonna do. And the summer we died had
(35:33):
some moments where I don't know what was going on.
I had like a clicking going on with my mic
and I think it had something to do with the
input and the output, and it was in one little
section and it completely like fucked the dialogue. And so
I did what any indie filmmaker would do, and I
was like, how do I fix this? Oh, let's just
shoehorn narration over it. So that's why I had some
(35:55):
of the girls doing some narrating over stuff. It was
actually just to hide those those bad moments of dialogue.
And yeah, it was it's just you know, as far
as sound goes, it's kind of just what can I
do with what I know? What can I do with
somebody who might be able to help me, and then
what can I do to just make it the best
it can be at my level?
Speaker 3 (36:16):
And I just try not to worry about it, you know.
Speaker 4 (36:18):
I like that you say that the best you could
do at your level. I think because there is this
there's this concept that you can have a movie that
looks like shit, and if it sounds bad, people will
think it's bad. But if visually we get away with
a lot. But I do think that there is a
bit of a happy medium where as long as you
understand what your sound is doing and you can explain
(36:39):
to the audience why it is the way it is,
you know, like through found footage or getting rid of
something and doing narration. Like as filmmakers we instantly connect
with that, but as just a random audience viewer, all
you need to do is feel like I understand what's happening,
I can get I can get into this, I'm going
with it. And with found footage, I think that's one
(36:59):
of the most important things. And adding in those layered
sound effects could be a huge saver as well.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
Yeah, you know, found footage is such a.
Speaker 8 (37:08):
Blessing sometimes because if you do have messed up sound,
you can throw a static and glitch sounds all over
it and the audience goes, oh, yeah, that's just part
of it, because that's what I'm here for, is that
kind of messy, that messy look, and so there's a
lot of you know, I don't I don't really know
how to describe it. Almost just like pitt or what
do you call safety nets? Yep, a lot of safety
(37:31):
nets with found footage. But then the flip side is
because of the genre, you also have a hard time
being able to set up certain shots because you have
to explain why the camera would be in that position
and why it's not moving, and so as far as
like effect stuff, Holy crap. That's when it's like, I
don't even know how I'm gonna pull this off visually
because I have to explain why the character is sitting
(37:52):
here staring at this thing for a long time to
get this really cool shot.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
You know.
Speaker 8 (37:58):
That's where I think a lot of people say found
footage is easy to make, and then when they go
to the visual.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Site, it's like, no, it's not.
Speaker 8 (38:04):
There's there's actually a lot of things you have to
figure out because you have one camera source and it
should be moving. It should be running away from this thing,
not just staring at it still. And that's that's where
it gets tough.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
Dylan makes a fantastic point about the fact that the
reality of your sound design and the reality of any
of the issues you may have in sound design are
all exaggerated by the visual, and they're all meant to
play together. You're only doing the sound design to play
(38:38):
with the visual. So as you're thinking about what you
want this movie to sound like and what this movie
needs to tonally be, it's important that you stylistically match
it with what you're showing visually. I think that that's
hard to explain because every movie is so different and
(39:00):
it's a challenge for a lot of us to figure
out what is that sound scope supposed to be When
we're working in independent film, and so if it's visually
not necessarily you know, a blockbuster. Look, we're running on
cameras that maybe aren't the most high end cameras, in
expensive lenses. Maybe you're shooting on an iPhone, maybe you're
(39:21):
shooting in many you know, we're shooting in all sorts
of different ways. Finding a way to match that tone
with the visual is super important. While I was speaking
of super while I was working on my Super eight
short film Tip Tap, which I think you can see
on YouTube. I don't know if it's up right now
but when this podcast comes out, but it will be
up very soon. It's called Tippity Tap. And in that
(39:44):
short film, Sean Ashley and I made a Super eight
film where we you know, it's him walking around and
the visual is obviously super eight, So the audio needed
to kind of match the score, needed to kind of
tonally play with that. And that was really challenging because
you can't make it bad, but you can't make it,
(40:05):
you know, super clean, or it's not going to fit
the style. So figuring out what your style is and
how the audio can play off of that properly is
It's it's a challenge that you as the filmmaker have
to take on and not take lightly. Taking that lightly
will make your movie feel cheap, I think most of
(40:26):
the time. And so if you take it seriously and
you really think about it and analyze what is this
supposed to sound like, it can elevate your film. I
talked to Michael Parow next about his movie Self Driver
and what he was able to do with sound. So
at what stage in the process do you start thinking
(40:47):
about sound design, what the tonal value of the movie
is going to be, where score is going to be,
how you're going to get the most out of your
actual you know, the audio from your performers. Is that
something you think about early? You just let your sound
person do it, or you're like, we'll get it in
the mix.
Speaker 7 (41:07):
Well, yeah, for self, Driver was a really unique situation
because it was basically the whole movie is inside a car,
and we didn't have room for or money really to
pay like an on set sound person, So I did
all the sound myself, on top of all the other
hats that was wearing. But it was, you know, because
it's a contained environment, it was fairly easy. We'd wired,
(41:30):
we had four mics in the car most of the
time and like one of those new thirty two bit
float recorders that you don't really have to worry about peeking,
and so as long as the signal was coming in
and we had like them relatively close to the actor's mouths,
we got pretty good audio most.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
Of the time.
Speaker 7 (41:48):
But it definitely was hugely important to me, and as
we were in prep, figuring that system out was a
big part of our prep process us finding the best
place for the mics, finding the like sort of best system,
and the best way to run the car. In a
funny way, we found like if we were going too
(42:11):
fast or if the fans were blowing in a certain direction,
it would fuck things up. Oh yeah, So we did
a lot of like prep and research in in the
like weeks leading up to our shoot. But yeah, sound,
you know, it's a cliche to say at this point,
but the sound one hundred percent is more important than
your picture.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
And so that we.
Speaker 7 (42:35):
We got the cleanest audio we could. But our movie,
because it takes place inside of a car, we wanted
to sort of paint a picture of a world outside,
and most of that was through audio. You know, we
get glimpses of what we're looking at or what the
driver sees, but a lot of the world is brought
in by the sound design.
Speaker 4 (42:56):
Was this something you thought about during the writing process, then,
if this sound is happening around, is it in the script?
Is it like something that you thought, Okay, we're not
gonna get away with showing this because I don't have
the budget for it, but I'm going to I'm going
to make sure that we know it through the sound
design for sure.
Speaker 7 (43:12):
For sure, I think there was a lot of it
in the script, and then just sort of me knowing like, Okay,
this takes place in an industrial neighborhood, so picturing like
industrial sounds, and then this is downtown at night, so
like hearing clubs pulsing through the windows, and like just
people chattering and parties going on and stuff like that.
(43:34):
That was all definitely like brewing while I was writing
and while we were in prep, and it helped a
lot in the edit, sort of knowing already what scenes
were going to sound like because I could pull our
like pull sound effects and record some stuff and drop
it in.
Speaker 4 (43:49):
Did you do folly and pull sound design yourself or
did you have someone doing the mix and master.
Speaker 7 (43:56):
That was our biggest price tag on our film was
our sound guy. I knew, like that's sort of the
one area that I wasn't confident in my own skills.
I love it, So we spent like like literally half
of our budget was paying like a sound guy to
do that work. And he did an amazing job. He
recorded all all of our folly was recorded. We don't
(44:17):
have a single can sound effect.
Speaker 4 (44:19):
Oh that's awesome.
Speaker 7 (44:20):
We wired the car up and we went spent an
afternoon just driving around collecting sounds from the car that
we used to film. So it was like genuine to
the yeah, legit sounds from it. Yeah, yeah, we I
mean the movie would not be we wouldn't be talking
about this movie had we not gone.
Speaker 2 (44:36):
With that guy and he hadn't done such a great job.
Speaker 4 (44:39):
That's awesome, and I totally agree with the Good Exorcist.
I ran into a million issues with sound. It was
like the biggest problem and taught me valuable lessons about
like make time for it, put it in the budget,
figure it out. And it also made me realize that
like for me personally, score is a quarter of the movie.
(44:59):
Like score for me saved my ass because having someone
doing score who was really good allowed me to cover
up some of the issues that I had and made
the audience go like, this is really like there's a
lot of skill in this right here. I'm like, it's
not me that is this score.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
The score.
Speaker 7 (45:15):
That's another really good point. Like as I was writing,
I was putting together I like to just set up
a Spotify playlist and just put sort of inspirational stuff
that feels like part of the tone of the film
that I'm picturing. And so by the time then I
usually pull all those tracks and put it in as
temp score for the edit. And so by that point
I had the most ambitious temp score you could possibly
(45:38):
have for a movie of our size. You know, like
all this our movie was based very heavily on like
eighties anime sound tracks. That's nice, awesome, all this super
yeah super danse music. And I got really lucky and
a friend of mine is a composer, and he was
free and looking for a movie to you, and he
(46:01):
loved the cut I sent him, and you know, yeah,
he gave us a lot of We paid him a
little bit, but not nearly what.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
He was worth, and he just he hit it out
of the park. And yeah, one d the score is
doing some heavy lifting in my movie.
Speaker 4 (46:18):
The one of the things I always say is like,
there's no I always feel like I don't pay my composers,
any composer enough, because they're so like they're invaluable. They
I could pay them the entire budget, I could pay
them millions and millions of dollars and they would still
be worth it. Like there they are the key to
making me look good, and same with you know the
(46:40):
sound I've I did sound on my own movie for
my last one, and because I wanted to learn because
I was so bad. I was like, I the first
one was so bad based on the person who did
the mix with the next one. I I ended up
getting rid of that person and doing the mix myself
in like three days for The Good Exorcist before it
was due for out By Southwest and then for Greywood Plot.
(47:02):
I was like, I'm going to learn how to do
this so I can communicate what I need and I
understand the way it works and the tricks. And that
was that was invaluable for me since then, Like being
able to actually communicate what I need based on having
done it was massively helpful.
Speaker 7 (47:18):
I think that's like sort of my the biggest thing
that I think the most important thing about making movies
on any level, but on this level especially is knowing
as much as you possibly can about every department, not
because you should like be doing other people's jobs or micromanaging,
but just so that you can communicate what you want.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
And you can.
Speaker 4 (47:39):
We don't have the time or money. We don't have
the time of money. You got to be able to
just go like, hey, man, I need you to make
sure that the decibels are at this level for this,
because that person's gonna yell.
Speaker 7 (47:48):
You know what I mean, like or like if you
want it to sound a certain way, like you understand
where mike placement is going to get you that sound.
And yeah, there's so many in the camera department too.
I think just being able to communicate quickly and clearly
is so valuable, and the only way you can do
that is by learning either on the job or doing
(48:10):
tons of research.
Speaker 4 (48:10):
But yeah, it sound is one of the most challenging
ones to Sound is so challenging to research because you
don't naturally have that available to you. It's just such
a specialty thing. So you're not like, ooh, I can
run around and mess with microphones and try them out
in different settings. But honestly, like, if if you can
go in and test microphones or even talk to a
(48:31):
sound person, you know, I highly recommend it to any
low budget filmmaker.
Speaker 5 (48:35):
Just go play.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
It's huge.
Speaker 7 (48:37):
Shadow someone for a day, you know.
Speaker 4 (48:39):
Practicing adr that's been another big thing I've done to
try to learn what are some of the ways to
communicate how we can get better ADR is not necessarily
to the sound person who's helping me with ADR, or
if I'm doing ADR myself, I know how to get
the proper recording, but practicing so I can figure out
how to get performances out of my cast.
Speaker 7 (48:57):
I mean, for that's another like skill for like an
actor being able to perform in that environment versus when
you're on set and like get the same emotion, get
the same tone as such a hard I don't know
how they.
Speaker 4 (49:12):
Do it, but when they pull it off, it's like
a magic trick.
Speaker 2 (49:16):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (49:16):
And when I when I work with actors who maybe
aren't as you know, in low budget filmmaking, some of
my people aren't as experience. I mean, shit, my mom's
in my.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
Movie, you know.
Speaker 4 (49:24):
Like I have people who have never acted before. Ever.
One of the things I've done with them is like
actually play the line back what they said in the moment,
even if it's like terrible audio, just play it back
and have them say it like three times in a row.
Speaker 7 (49:39):
Yeah, I think, I mean, I feel like that's how
they used to do it. You'd like hear the line
and then repeat it, and then hear the line and
then repeat it.
Speaker 4 (49:45):
I think that's a trick that I've learned from I
was an animation director for many years, and an animation
we would have to do that where someone would deliver
a line but then we needed to change it a
little bit, but like the animation still had to match
because we had animated it. So we'd be like, Okay,
so we need you to deliver this line at about
this pace, but you just need to go like up
on this word. So we play it back and then
(50:06):
be like, just go up, just go up, just to
get that timing flawless. Right, Yeah, So do you have
any So it sounds like for the most part, you
guys had it figured out when you went in, and
you know, there were the little issues with the sound
or whatever. But are there any like bits of advice
you would give a filmmaker when they do have sound
(50:26):
issues or something that could help them in post while
editing to maybe fix a sound cover something.
Speaker 2 (50:36):
Oh that's a good question.
Speaker 7 (50:39):
Well, I'll say that technology is crazy now, so there's
tools that, like a lot of them are you have
to pay for. So like our sound editor had all
the plug crazy plugins that you could ask for. But
even like Adobe has that new podcast AI Pod Adobe
Podcast where basically it'll take your audio and then take
(51:01):
everything with AI somehow strip out all the background audio
and just make it sound super super clean.
Speaker 2 (51:09):
And that was crazy.
Speaker 7 (51:10):
Like I used that a few times in our just
edit to clean up a few refer bits and it
was totally usable.
Speaker 4 (51:19):
The technology has getting incredible. I was at a I
was filming some interviews at a conference, a massive conference
that was packed, and they had these little d DGI
law of microphones that have noise cancelation like built into them,
and I was like, these this audio is going to
be unusable. Like I went into it thinking like we're
(51:41):
never going to use this footage because it's going to
be terrible. And I got back to the editing bay
and started working, and I was like, oh my lord,
this is beautiful. Like this audio is better than I
ever could have got any other way. I cannot believe
how good this is.
Speaker 7 (51:54):
So the technology is there. I think a good piece
of advice like got was like if things stay concerned,
then you can get away with like a noisy environment
if for some reason you can't clean it up. If
you keep this audio sort of consistent across the scene,
and you're not hearing the edits, so you can you
can have a louder background and it can be sort
(52:16):
of an a noisy environment if you justify that in
the sort of diegesis of your film. As long as
you're not hearing the edits, and as long as the
general like thing is consistent across your scene, then you
can get away with more noise than I think you
You would think when you hear a clip on its own,
(52:36):
it sounds like terrible, But if you're in the sort
of flow of a scene, it's not the worst thing
to have some noise as long as you're not hearing.
Like I said, but hearing the edits is the thing
that kills kills a scene and.
Speaker 4 (52:50):
Takes Yeah, that's where room tone and getting sound in
the moment is. So I've just I've learned to make
sure you get that because then you can say things
with that background noise, a little bit of tonal value
faded faded over a long period of time can like
totally save you.
Speaker 7 (53:07):
Yeah, and just getting more I think, more and more
more atmosphere than you think you need, like I usually
have even in my edits, like three or four levels
of or three or four different tracks of background audio.
Some of it's just a room tone, and then some
is like the traffic outside the window, birds outside the window,
like a fridge running, little things to just help fill
(53:29):
out the scene and make it feel like a real environment.
I think if you sit down and hold your breath
and listen, even in a quiet room, there's a lot
of sound, and when you're recording clean audio in a
room with just room tone, you're not getting that. Like
there's more sound in actual life than we get on
a recording of a scene usually, and so filling that
(53:52):
out helps a lot and just sort of making something
feel alive.
Speaker 4 (54:00):
Consistency in film is something we don't talk enough about,
in the fact that with low budget filmmaking, it's incredibly
challenging to stay consistent, to keep your style consistent throughout
the film, to keep effects consistent, to keep performances consistent.
All of us are challenged by this more than any
(54:24):
more than the big budget movies are, because they have
so many people watching out to make sure that everything's consistent.
We constantly have to watch it for ourselves, so sound, visuals,
everything can lose consistency. And I think that Michael made
a great point about how consistency will help tone throughout
(54:46):
the entire movie. If there is a specific value in
your music, a specific value in the audio quality, all
of those things can help the audience become comfortable and
forget their watching movie. And that's at the end of
the day, what we're trying to do when we're telling
a story is to have the audience completely forget that
they're just watching a movie, but to rather get especially
(55:10):
a low budget movie. We mostly want them to forget
they're watching a low budget movie, but instead start to
think about how they're watching something fun, how they're being entertained,
or how they're being scared, how they're being emotionally pulled
from place to place, and that consistency is incredibly important.
Thank you so much to my guests Alex kuwalm Spooky Madison,
(55:32):
Dylan Brown, and Michael Perow for coming on the show
and talking about something that is It's a challenging topic
to discuss because we aren't all necessarily focused on the
sound design. We're focused on making a movie, telling a story.
Getting visuals and sound is just one little piece, but
it's a very important piece. Thinking about your score, thinking
(55:54):
about what the tonal value of your movie is layering
those sound designs. There so many takeaways from these conversations
that I think filmmakers, low budget filmmakers can can learn
and utilize in their next movies. I am using this
information in my movie right now. I learned things listening
(56:18):
to these folks talk about how they use sound that
has helped me with Get That Dick and the other
films that I'm working on right now, because it's hard
when you're running and gunning and you're running sound and
you're having to think about how you're going to do adr.
(56:38):
It can become overwhelming. And the sound, like I talked about,
is so important to me that it's hard for me
to let go of it sometimes and to just let
it be and enjoy the process of making the movie
when I know that the sound is going to be
a challenge throughout. Thank you so much for listening. If
you want to support the show and hear new episodes
(56:58):
ad free, head over to patreon dot com slash Flush Studios.
It helps keep the lights on here and gives you
early access to all of the stuff I'm working on.
There's going to be some behind the scenes from my
movie Get That Dick and there's going to be. There's
a lot of great stuff. There's already eight hundred posts
up there. It's a dollar a month or like ten
eleven dollars for the year or something like that. Subscribe
(57:20):
to the Patreon. It helps support this podcast and other stuff.
And again, thank you so much to my guests for
coming on. Make sure to go check out all of
their movies and I'm very excited to see what all
of them work on next. Until next time, keep kicking ass.
If you want to be a part of this show,
make sure to head over to the Flush Studios Instagram
(57:42):
and leave me a message, or the Patreon or the
Flush Studios discord, or my Facebook, wherever you want to
reach out. That's how you can touch with me, or
flush Studios at gmail dot com is a great way
to reach out as well. If you're a filmmaker who
wants to be on the show, you can reach out
to me through there. I have got more incredible filmmakers
(58:04):
throughout the rest of the season. I did an interview
with the cinematographer on my short film Little Luca and
the Big Deal, Dennis Collo, and he just recently put
out a new show on screen Box called The Trouble
with Tessa and he it was a fantastic conversation, even
if I did kind of screw up the audio. Ironically,
(58:27):
audio consistently pulling me down and being the challenge to
overcome in this process of creating art and telling stories.
But until next time, keep creating, keep experimenting, and as always,
stay rebellious.
Speaker 8 (58:46):
Low Budget Rebels is brought to you by the indie
film Hustle Network, recorded at Flush Studios headquarters in tropical Atlanta.
Produced by the film Daddy, Josh Stifter, Hella Babooz,
You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more
amazing filmmaking and screenwriting podcasts, just go to ifhpodcastnetwork dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Low Budget and Rebels.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
Cast.
Speaker 4 (00:27):
Welcome to another episode of Low Budget Rebels Season six.
I am so pumped about this episode because it is
such a fascinating topic and when you break down the
elements that go into making a low budget film, one
of the first things that falls apart, and you see
(00:49):
it so often, You've seen it in my movies. It
is an incredible struggle is the sound. Whether that's getting
sound on set, finding ways to improve your sound design,
saving your movie with score. All of these things are
elements of creating a low budget film that are so
(01:11):
absolutely challenging because sound is the last thing we think about,
and it's the first thing we should be thinking about,
they say, and everyone in this episode basically says it
that bad sound design will ruin a movie. The audience
will forgive visuals that are maybe used in a way
that maybe looks like it conveys artistic expression, but generally,
(01:34):
you know, it's because we're making independent films and we
don't have the gear that some of the bigger productions have.
But with sound design. The audience will struggle to forgive
and forget. They'll notice it, and it's something that you
maybe at first don't even realize, but as the movie progresses,
you notice it more and more so. Finding ways through
(01:57):
the artists who have done it, the people who have
come before us. That's how I have, over the years
learned to try to get the best sound. And one
of the tricks that I've learned is to layer sounds
in incredible amounts while I'm in the mix, making sure
that the person who's mixing, or if I'm mixing it myself,
that I'm layering tiny details. Now, nothing drives me more
(02:19):
crazy than too many footsteps or sound design that becomes overbearing.
But if you can layer sounds and find a way
to make your movie pop with the sound design, use
the sound design as a character and properly portray the
emotion of the moment you score. To fill those beats
(02:41):
where maybe the sound design is lacking, and find tricks
that will help you get rid of hums, whether that
is you know, the airplane sound of sounds, or car
sounds or an ac running, any of those things that
you can do to help or utilizing adr Uh, making
sure that you build that into your schedule and into
(03:03):
your budget and into the time that you have to
make your movie. Those things can go a long ways.
I remember Robert Rodriguez on Rebel without a Crew talk
to us about getting adr while we were in the moment,
and it's something that I just straight up didn't have
the time to do. And I always regretted not doing
it because I think it would have really helped had
(03:25):
I had the cast and crew just read through the
script while I was there. Now, I did do that
for a couple of sequences, and the biggest issue just
became simply that I didn't have time to go through
it and fix it all. And I had someone doing
sound design who screwed the pooch a bit and wasn't
able to actually get the sound to where I wanted it,
(03:46):
and I had to fix it myself last minute. But
there are elements to being on set and knowing what
you're able to utilize in that moment that will help
you improve your sound, really paying attention to it. Spooky
Madison describes exactly that they're the director behind the upcoming
Fiberburn and What's Wrong Wendy, And there's an element in
(04:10):
this conversation about trust with your crew and knowing that
your sound mixer and the person running your audio in
the moment are going to be honest with you and
make sure that you're getting the best sound the moment
that you say camera rolling, sound speeding, the sound speeding
is a trust that comes between the director and the
(04:33):
sound person in that moment, and Spooky discusses exactly that.
When you're directing or producing and you're on set, how
conscious of the sound are you? Because I know a
lot of filmmakers who just like sound person, you take it,
set it and forget it thing. And I've had so
many bad experiences that the sound is like one of
(04:53):
those things that I'm always thinking about now It's number
two in the back of my head behind performance.
Speaker 5 (05:00):
I am very conscious of sound. I work with the
sound girl, her name's Andrea Lowe almost in every single
film that I do.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
Awesome.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
That's a relationship that needs I have learned is one
of the most important relationsships in indie filmmaking is having
a sound person you trust and knows how to communicate
what's happening.
Speaker 5 (05:20):
Absolutely, and Columbus, Ohio is just full of amazing sound people.
We really do have a really great network of sound people,
sound mixers, and boom mops. But with Andrea, it's become
second nature to like wait for her permission to start shooting. Like,
(05:40):
as the director, I'm waiting for my sound person's permission
because I don't want to plane fucking up the shoot,
you know.
Speaker 4 (05:46):
Oh yeah, when I hear that sound speed, when someone
says sound speeding, like I'm that's when I'm just like, okay,
we're now, We're good to go.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (05:54):
Yeah, I think that that little trio of you know,
camera rolls, sound speed the order of things right there.
You know, I think that sound is really important. You
can get away with some really artsy, badly shot movies,
but if your sound sucks, then it's not good.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
Have you found anything specific while doing the mix or
in the process of filming, any like little tidbits you've
learned help get the sound design the sound mix that
you're looking for.
Speaker 5 (06:24):
Yeah, I kind of know when I'm writing the script
what challenges we might encounter, like on the day of
the shoot. So I'm really I mean, I'm really relying
on my sound mixer and my boom operator to make
sure that you know, cars aren't driving by, and you
(06:45):
just have to have a really good mixer who knows
how to reduce, you know, like denoising the the whole
track if needed before you have to edit with it.
Andrea is a sound mixer and she always offers, you know,
She's like, just let me know if you need me
to clean it up, I'll clean it up for you.
But as an editor, I'm always like, you know, exploring
new ways to do it myself because I overwork myself constantly.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
But do you do a lot of sound stuff in
the edit? If when you're editing, do you actually like
because I find that without certain sounds, without certain tonal values,
I can't feel the movie.
Speaker 5 (07:19):
Oh yeah, I always edit to tones, sounds on beyond
any type, like different types of room tones. I'm always
editing with some type of sound because that's really how
it's going to help the flow of my scene when
I'm editing, but also it's going to help my score
guy know what I was going for and create something similar.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
You mentioned sound, knowing when you're writing where issues may be,
where there may be problematic tones or you know, car noises,
whatever the thing is. Is sound a big part of
your writing process.
Speaker 5 (07:56):
Oh yeah, oh yeah, I realized how much in the
table for Wendy when uh there's a lot of italic
sized like clangs or you know, like it's like ding
the convenience store door opens. You know, it's like a
sound is very prevalent. In my scripts. I used a
lot of squelch and when.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
Squelch is a great one, Oh yes, love it. So
in how picky are you in the mix? I asked
this because like when I'm doing when I'm editing a
project and i send it to a sound mixer and
I'm sitting with them going through it, I have found
that I'm incredibly picky.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
Uh So, I have mixed all of my movies right myself.
In post I've had a boom Hop on set, but
in posts, I'm usually I have mixed them all. And
then for Wendy, I have both a mixer now and
a boom mop to kind of take all the slack
from me. But I am I'm incredibly picky because I
(09:03):
don't like it when people overcompensate, like the d noise
effects in Premiere Yeah right, and then because they think
that it's like clearing out all the empty space into nothingness,
and I just it just sounds like everyone's underwater. I
am incredibly picky. So that's why I do them myself,
because I want to make sure that I'm not that
(09:23):
I am performing at my own high standards, you know.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
So how do you go about actually putting your sound together?
Speaker 5 (09:31):
Then?
Speaker 4 (09:31):
Do you do your own? Do you do ADR? Do
you do your own sound effects?
Speaker 5 (09:36):
ADR? Especially a lot of folly. Fully is so fun.
I love doing.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
It's such a blast. People who don't do fully, I'm
just like, you're missing out on one of the most
fun things in the filmmaking process.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (09:48):
Yeah, all the wet sounds you can get and all
like the just the stuff you can play with with
different fruits, and yeah, I think it's great. So I
do a lot of ADR.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I do a lot of FOLLY.
Speaker 5 (09:59):
I have a subscription to pixe BA, so I get
like a lot of stock stuff and it's all about
layering that and making and sometimes making it a totally
new sound with a bunch of different.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Sounds in the sound design. And while you're trying to
put together your movie, being able to have that creativity
to think outside the box and decipher what the tonal
value should be, what the sound effects should be, what
the sound is. Sometimes that's the most enjoyable part. Spooky
(10:33):
brought up, you know, fruit squelching sound effects and the
different kind of processes you can use to get fun
folly in your film. That has been an incredible experience
for me. In my short film The First of November,
I used all sorts of different peppers and celery and
vegetables to make crunching sounds, and fruits to make the squishing,
(10:56):
and actually had a pumpkin that I crushed, and I
found it so enjoyable to be able to take that
moment in my filmmaking process and actually enjoy creating the sounds.
And like Spooky said, sometimes you can find a completely
different sound or mix a couple of weird sound effects
together that you would never think would work, but they will.
(11:19):
It's all about tricking the audience into believing that's the
sound they're hearing. And it's an underutil it's not underutilized.
I think you know a lot of the independent filmmakers
I talk to, they love doing this. But it becomes
one of those things where you can spend hours and
hours and hours working on it and eventually you feel
(11:39):
like you just have to get the product out there
and get the movie shown. But having that sort of
fun with Adr and with Foley can be one of
the most enjoyable parts of the process. I can't tell
you how many times I've been on set or been
listening to the audio after we filmed and found noises
(12:02):
and found tones buried in between takes or in little
moments that I never would have thought of. And you know,
like on set, I never would have thought this sound
effect could be used here. But just thinking outside of
the box can help you find tones. And every movie
is its own audio experience. And I'm gonna be talking
(12:23):
next with Alex Kuwalm, who directed the movie Forgiveness and
the recent film Failure, which are he does incredibly long
takes in these movies. Failure is essentially one long take
of a movie, and you can instantly start to think
how challenging sound design must be on a project like that,
because it's not as simple as just getting the tone.
(12:47):
You've got to have Mike set up in proper locations,
and like he talks about, you got to use your
lava leers properly. And the love can come in so
handy while working on Get That Dick, I tried to
use loves as much as I could, and I found
that the LAVs actually were able to help me gain
a room tone and other noises that I didn't expect
(13:08):
to get. Even the sound of a shirt rustling in
the Love could end up being used in other parts
where I needed just a hint of tonal value when
someone was moving. So being able to take pieces of
audio and move it around. That's one of the benefits
of getting as much sound as you can on set
as possible, and I recommend getting as much sound as
(13:31):
you can get on set as possible. Don't be stingy
with the sounds. If you have multiple mics, run them.
Don't be afraid to have more sound than you might
think you need, because when you get into the edit
or when your editor starts working on it, they can
always just mute those tracks, disable them, get rid of them.
But having them is imperative to actually knowing you have
(13:56):
everything you need. It's just like footage. You need to
have the shot, you need to have the audio, and yes,
you can get it in ADR, and you can fix
it with folly, and you can do all these things.
But if you get it in the moment. It can
just add value to what you did that day on set.
So next up, I'm talking to Alex Kuwalm and it's
exciting to hear him talk about the tricks that he
(14:16):
used in making a movie that is a single take,
and I think some of this advice can be used
on anyone's independent film. This movie is unique in the
fact that you have to work in parameters technically that
a lot of people don't have to with failure. I'll
set up my shot, I'll figure out visually what I
(14:37):
want it to be, and then I kind of build
things around it. So I'm just like, here is the angle,
Here is where the camera's going to be. Then I
build my lighting around that. Then I build where's my
shotgun mic going to be, where my love is going
to be, How I'm gonna set up sound? And that's
where I'm leading with. This is the sound on this movie.
I'm it's incredibly well done, and I think one of
(14:59):
the things that I there's a bunch of things I
appreciate about it, But I want you to speak to like,
how did you go about doing sound design on this
and directing from pre production? Figuring out how you're going
to do it all the way to the final movie.
How did sound work?
Speaker 6 (15:15):
So that's a great question because sound is a very
you know, it's very important for every movie. But for
this movie, since there's no room for a boom, there's
no boom in this movie, like at all. So that
was the conversation I had with the sound team, and
I'm like, guys, like, there's no way someone can follow
the camera, So what are we going to do?
Speaker 3 (15:34):
So what we did is like we put a lot
of lavaliers throughout the house.
Speaker 6 (15:38):
A lot of hidden microphones, so in the closet, in
the living room, the basement, like all all the areas.
But also the actors were wearing levelers. The only thing
is due to budget restrictions in the again, we had
to I think we had like eight lavliers pert like
with the cast. So there's a moment where we have
(16:01):
like all the lava layers are BC and then we're
gonna have new actors going in on the next scene.
So when they exited, you know, the house, they had
to take off the lavalers and and.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
They put it to the other actors.
Speaker 6 (16:17):
Dude, and you know, I'm not thinking about this because
that's the sound work. Yeah, right, right, right, But we
talk about it and I'm like, I trust them. I mean,
I'm sure they're gonna have nailed it and everything. So
they're like Alex every time I say God, They're like, oh, amazing.
We were able to do it, dude, like we so
they were very excited to do it. But yeah, we
had the Lavalaer situation in the house with the actors.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
We had more budget.
Speaker 6 (16:40):
We can mike everybody, but we just didn't have that resources.
But anyways, it worked out, and in sound design it
was awesome because like there's no cheating, there's no way
to like, oh, I'm turning to behind me and then
there's something else happening, right. Like, the sound design was
very like organic, so it was kind of like, Okay,
we got to make sure that the phone calls and
(17:02):
the folly and what's happening everything feels like like.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
Life like gets there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, gets there.
Speaker 6 (17:08):
So the sound designer hell that which we've been working
for now twelve years, she's actually doing now the remedy
with her team. It was that, Okay, we got to
make sure this feels organic, but also like it doesn't
feel artificial. Or it doesn't feel like too much, and
she got it. It was awesome, man, because the sound
was so well on set that we only had to
(17:29):
record out of the eighty seven minutes like two pages.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
Of ADR, which is nothing.
Speaker 7 (17:34):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
And when I say two pages of all the.
Speaker 6 (17:36):
Cast like Ted Crazy, you know, Daniel, everybody. So I
was like, Wow, the sound guys did a very good
job because we didn't have to record. It was like
a less than an hour session. So yeah, I mean
the sound guys were amazing. I mean I'm working with
them ever and ever ever again, Like I love them.
So yeah, those guys are killers. They're great, They're awesome.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:01):
So that's I think that there's something there to be
said about the fact that one of my biggest pet
peeves is when the sound design is too much. And
with a movie like this, that would be very easy
to do. It would be super easy to have every
footsteps sound very loud. Footsteps are my biggest pet peeve,
(18:21):
Like I just oh, I hate the folly when it's
just like no one when you are listening in real life,
you don't hear people walking, so when you like, maybe
that would be the actual tone in the room. But
I don't care. I don't want to hear the reality
of it because you're just pulling my focus out of
the movie. It's it's you know, like when a movie's
(18:44):
focus isn't enough or it's too much, I get pulled
out of the movie because what I want to see
from the camera is what my eye sees, what my
focus is, That's what I want. And so when you
have a movie like, uh, you know, Zack Snyder right
now is doing the crazy fucking deep focus, I get
pulled out of the movie.
Speaker 5 (19:02):
Now.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
It's visually sometimes kind of cool, and I can be
like that's a cool shot. That's a cool shot, but
I'm never completely pulled in because of the fact that like,
my eye doesn't see that way. And the same thing
goes for folly. I think people overdo it, and with
a movie like this could be overdone in those sound
in those sound design sessions, was that like a conversation
that was had, like let's bring that down, bring that up?
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (19:23):
No, absolutely, there's and and I agree with you. There's
a lot of movies that you watch and it's like, okay,
I mean they it's in purpose, you know, it's too
much because they want that for the audience. But on
this one, yeah, we role was that and when we
were when Kila was showing me like, hey, this is
the first you know pass on the folly, Listen, let
me know what you think it was, it was cool
(19:44):
because you know she she knows me now very well
for almost, like I said, like twelve years, so it's
kind of like now I don't have to tell her
because she knows what I like.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
And the folly was great.
Speaker 6 (19:56):
Since the first pass, I was like, okay, it's organic,
it's not truly does and feel like too much.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
And then the other artists, which is part of her team,
she was like.
Speaker 6 (20:05):
Okay, if you need less, I can go less or
more and more. But I was like, no, I mean
it sounds pretty good. And then on the mix, of
course we're gonna go up and down. But no, man
like they they were also un they're wonderful, and it
was a thing that they know me. They know me
one hundred percent what I like and uh, it's when
you find those collaborators makes your life so much easier.
(20:27):
And it's just like the rule of thumb is this,
you know, it has to feel organic, that's yeah. If
it doesn't feel organic. I'm not interested. We're gonna have
to redo it so they know that, and then okay
we go from there. But no, it was it was
very cool and and and also with the with the
composer because the composer, I wanted wood wood instruments because
the whole house is made of wood, brilliant, So it
(20:50):
was like, okay, let's let's I want the audience to
feel like in the house entirely.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
At what point did you go, I want wood instruments.
Was that like a concept you had, because this is
something as I'm working on my new movie. I'm working
with a brand new composer and we're not even in
production yet, and I'm already talking to him about like
themes instrumentation where I want the score to go, because
I feel like if I can hit that early on,
even before we go into production and I have a
(21:14):
couple of themes to work with, it will inspire the
feeling of the movie. If I can show my cast
like this is the feeling, like listen to it. That's
such a it's such a pivotal part of any movie.
Is that sound? What is the tonal value of or
what's the tonal theme of this movie, and that's been
(21:35):
a big part of his instrumentation. So the wood element,
the woodwind instrument element is such a brilliant thing because
of that room.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
Yeah, no, I agree.
Speaker 6 (21:44):
If you can give them a piece of white, this
is like the environment that I'm visualizing, I think that's
great for failure. We didn't we didn't plant it before
the shoot. It was more so like the more we
were shooting, it was like, Okay, we're surrounded by wood.
And then it was like, hey, man, like, would you
mind just just you know, using wood instruments. And then
(22:05):
when he saw the movie, he's like, it makes total sense.
Speaker 4 (22:08):
Let's just do what that's it, And it just was
this composer someone you've worked with before. Is this your
normal composer?
Speaker 6 (22:15):
No, No, this is a so vincent is I mean
he's been around for he's like sixty eight, so he's
been around for quite a long time.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
But now this is the first time I work with him.
He's great, and.
Speaker 6 (22:27):
It was we have the same taste. So it's funny
like when when you talk to composers about movies and scores,
if you have that click of like, okay, this is
the taste, and then they replied, oh, yeah, yeah, this
is direct. It's okay, great, so then they know exactly
what you want. Uh So he fell in love with
the film, like even he saw a super role. Like
I literally I show him the film with no sound,
(22:48):
no nothing. I was like, this is you know, because
usually that's how it looks, but it's the look and
he loved it. He's like, dude, if we can elevate
it with the with the instruments and then with the
with your sound is so yeah, he's he loves the film.
He's very proud of the film, and that.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
Should be The score is fantastic. But I think that
that's fascinating. I like the fact that you've made the
point of with sound and score this movie, you work
with someone new, you work with people you've worked with before,
you've worked with the sound designer that you've worked with
for twelve years or whatever. You said, like building these
relationships but also letting new people in it. Just there's
(23:25):
this element of that's how that's the best way in
my opinion, to continue to make movies. After you've made
your first low budget or your second low budget or whatever,
and you're trying to build up to the next movie
the next level. Bringing some of those people back but
then also letting new people in is so it's like
a key. No, it's a trick. It's literally a scam
(23:46):
that we get to pull.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Yeah, it's fresh.
Speaker 6 (23:48):
It's like they bring fresh things to the table because
you know you're used to like days in that and
then they bring like this fresh alias and it's like, oh,
oh this is good. Like, for example, for the Remedy,
I'm working with these other and it's not like Vincent
can't do it. It's just the composer that I'm using
for the remedy he.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
Only does horror. He only does horror, and I needed
a horror fan like I needed that.
Speaker 5 (24:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
Yeah, it's a totally different sound, different sound.
Speaker 6 (24:14):
So yeah, I know he watched the remedy and he's like,
oh my, I love it. This is gonna be my
bead score. So he got very palmed, very excited. And yeah,
I mean the music that he does like you're scared,
you know, it's like oh shit, you know, like it's
very scary his music.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
So I love it. It was a perfect match. I
will work with Vincent again, but for the Remedy, it's
like I needed a horror horror fan.
Speaker 5 (24:36):
You know.
Speaker 4 (24:37):
You know, one of the things I really liked about
the score in Failure is the fact that it did
build the tension, but it also because it was woodwind,
it had this like soothing element to it where it
was almost like it made me calm as I was
watching everything at certain points, And I think that that's
a really smart move versus doing the like strings where
(25:00):
you could have easily just done tension. Just I could
see that playing through the whole thing as well. And
it's a completely different movie, a completely different style of
tension then. And I appreciate the fact that you that
you had this would win and this kind of like
relaxed tone because it made me feel like it made
me continue to want to watch the movie because I
(25:22):
was very relaxed through it even though it was very
tense situations.
Speaker 6 (25:26):
Yeah, that's that's a conversation that we wanted, you know,
with you know, Vincent and Ice, like, okay, in this
part it's like a thriller, but also like to keep
the audience guessing and to keep the audience in this wooden,
you know house environment that they're it's kind of like calm.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
As you were saying, because it is stressful.
Speaker 6 (25:43):
There's there's parts of the film that you were like, ash,
you know, what's gonna happen here, and it's not crazy.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
So I always like to, you know.
Speaker 6 (25:50):
To make different things like, for example, in other projects,
I like to have like super peaceful music with a
lot of violence, you know, and I mean you seen
it with forgiveness, yeah, And then it's the opposite. It's
kind of like there's like a stress and balance, and
I like to mix it with like peace or more
calm music.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
So I like to go to those like balances.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
Not only was Alex full of technical ideas and advice
for how to actually make a project like that work,
and I believe that's something that people can utilize on
any sort of independent film, making sure that they have audio,
the ability to record audio in different places and in
(26:37):
different ways to be able to get full room tones
and all of these different sounds. But also the way
he talks about balance in the score and in the audio.
I think that that's an under not underappreciated, but it's
something we don't always think about when we're in the
process of putting together our soundscape for the film. It's
often just like what is the tent When can we
(26:59):
hit the tension if you're making a horror movie, or
what's going to be the sweetest sound score wise, or
the best tone or whatever. But the reality is is
there's this ebb and flow of music that is necessary
to pull together the movie in a way that forces
(27:20):
the audience to feel multiple emotions, not just one, and
that there's in one scene you can invoke multiple feelings,
even if that's using silence or using a very minor tone,
something that just elevates the emotion of what we're seeing.
(27:41):
On my new movie, Get That Dick, there was a
scene that was very by the numbers conversational when I
wrote it. In my head, like I talked to Spooky
about I'm thinking about the sound and the tones as
I'm editing and as I'm writing, and while I was
writing the scene, I just imagined it being a conversation.
(28:02):
But as I got into the edit, I noticed that
if I gave it a sweet tone in the background,
but gave it some minor chords, if the score itself
was very, very minimal but utilized minor chords, I couldn't
I could make the scene have more emotion than I
(28:22):
initially intended, and it made me enjoy the scene more.
And then watching it with the few people I've showed
it to so far, they it hits. It resonates that
it is an emotional moment between these two characters, even
though on paper it might just read like a simple conversation.
I think that's really important. Finding those balances and those
ups and downs is one of the ways we can
(28:46):
actually invoke an emotion that maybe wasn't necessarily there on
the page. Up next, I'm talking to Dylan Brown and
speaking of balance, we talked about his movie, his found
footage movie, Tahoe Joe, and obviously the found footage movie
you're going to be doing a very different style of
sound design, but it is still about finding a balance
(29:06):
of how do I explain to the audience what they
need to be feeling through sound design, the distance of
the monster to the people, or the tonal value of
the woods in the moment. And something I noticed on
Greywood's plot, even little things that I think a lot
of people take for granted. If you're in a room
(29:27):
and you're sitting with two characters, you're naturally going to think, well,
I don't need outdoor noises. I don't need tones that
we wouldn't hear in a room. But the reality is
is you still hear in those tones even if you're
in a room, And it can make the difference between
making your film feel low budget and making it not.
If I'm being honest, like, I have seen plenty of
(29:49):
low budget movies where just the addition of cricket sounds
distant in the background during a night sequence that's taking
place inside can help elevate that movie, or the sound
design of a city as we're sitting near a window.
Those small details, even if they're just barely noticeable, maybe
(30:09):
you don't even notice them, just subconsciously you feel them,
can make a world of difference. So Dylan Brown talks
about Tahoe Joe and his kind of experimental film The
Summer We Died, and how sound design played into those films,
especially with found footage and experimental stuff. When you're in
(30:31):
production and then when you get into post production, what
is the process like and where is your mind through
that process?
Speaker 8 (30:38):
Yeah, you know, I have I've fallen into the trap
of having rough sound stuff because with found footage, we
usually try to go directional sound just because it's like that's.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
The most, that's what yep, yeah, you know.
Speaker 8 (30:52):
And then I'll just flat admit I don't have the
crew to have like a sound person. Many times I
am my cameraman and director and special effects guy, and
so sometimes it's just let's hope the road that's on
the camera picks up what I need and all ady
r later if I have to. But what I always
try to do with sound as far as like in
(31:13):
the post, is I learned that layering sounds is like
an absolute must. Like I'm doing a headstop, it's gotta
be like nine different sounds.
Speaker 4 (31:22):
Exactly right, dude, exactly right.
Speaker 8 (31:24):
Yeah, And and I can pick up now when movies
do just like a one sound and they go, oh,
that's good. That's there's a slow throat slash, and it's
just like a it's a hollow layer to me, And
I'm like, no, if I'm gonna do a throat slash,
I'm gonna be like in my microphone like tearing a
steake apart. And then I'm gonna get a throat slash
from somewhere online that's cool. And then I'm gonna get
(31:46):
a hilarious like sword sheath sound that would never actually
make that real sound, but you got to have it
in there for the movie. And so I'm all about layers,
like that's my big thing is layers, and then just experimenting.
Most of Tahoe Joe's sounds were actually my one year
old at the time, cooing into the microphone and I
(32:06):
slowed it way down, and that's most of the bigfoot
noise is the baby.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
Actually, that's amazing.
Speaker 4 (32:12):
I love that you use the knife the sheath sound
effect as an example. I use the animation whoosh sound
like everything moves with a whoosh. I put that in movies.
It's at like negative thirty five decibels. It's so quiet
you could barely tell it's there, but it's just enough
to make you know. Same with footsteps. You know, you
(32:33):
can easily grab a footstep off of audio blocks or
wherever the fucking throw it in there, but there's something
about like the actual layering of just the tiniest bit
of noise. So feet steps, I keep them so quiet,
they're barely there, and there's like four layers of foot
and creaking of floor and everything, but you would never
(32:53):
even notice it.
Speaker 8 (32:55):
I mean, I felt like if we were gonna do
like a creature in the woods thing. There is no
way anybody would believe that something's breathing or growling out
there if it doesn't sound like it's far away, if
it's moving around, it's gotta be echo.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Wee.
Speaker 8 (33:12):
There's gotta trees and things in the way, Like there's
there's so many other sounds in the forest that would
mix with that. So like when we did Tahoe Joe,
we were out at night in the woods. We actually
just set the camera up and just filmed. I think
I filmed for like three or four minutes just to
get you know, sound, just to see what's the natural
sounds out here. And then I had like light wind sounds,
(33:36):
I had wind through the trees. We had birds and crickets.
And then when we finally did the bigfoot stuff, Yeah,
it's like that was like an almost an afterthought and
it's there and it's there to be creepy, but to me,
it was like he has to feel distant in the darkness.
He can't feel like he's like always right in front
(33:57):
of the camera because it just the effect is not
to be pulled off, right if there's not depth to
the sound. And it was just through experimentation. I have
no background in any of that stuff, but it was like,
if I can hear it naturally. And this is another
thing I do with sound that maybe like completely off
the wall, but I tend to do all of my
(34:19):
sound effects stuff with just my ears and no headphones
at first, because I want to see what are my
ears gonna hear if I'm watching it on TV, That's
how I'm gonna pick it up, not necessarily through headphones,
So let me hear it this way first, and then
I'll put on headphones and start playing with stuff. But
I usually do like a natural kind of adjustment first,
(34:39):
just to see like what's comfortable for me before I
start even putting headphones in.
Speaker 4 (34:44):
Wow, that is fascinating. I have never tried that, but
it's an interesting concept. It's similar to the I do
a test after I film every movie where I listen
to it, like or after I finish the like rough cut,
where I don't watch it. I just listen and I'm like,
if there's something that feels off in the audio, it
probably feels off in the edit. And it's simple. It's
a similar like going into its sort of blind, going
(35:05):
into like audio blind from the headphones taking naturally what's
coming in.
Speaker 8 (35:10):
Yeah, yeah, it just helped me, I think, because I
felt like, if it's if it's glaringly obvious, out of
whack to my ears, it's gonna be amplified a hundred
times in the headphones, so you know, and then sometimes
I run into where it's just like I'm screwed. The
audio we captured is not great. Yes, I don't know
what I'm gonna do. And the summer we died had
(35:33):
some moments where I don't know what was going on.
I had like a clicking going on with my mic
and I think it had something to do with the
input and the output, and it was in one little
section and it completely like fucked the dialogue. And so
I did what any indie filmmaker would do, and I
was like, how do I fix this? Oh, let's just
shoehorn narration over it. So that's why I had some
(35:55):
of the girls doing some narrating over stuff. It was
actually just to hide those those bad moments of dialogue.
And yeah, it was it's just you know, as far
as sound goes, it's kind of just what can I
do with what I know? What can I do with
somebody who might be able to help me, and then
what can I do to just make it the best
it can be at my level?
Speaker 3 (36:16):
And I just try not to worry about it, you know.
Speaker 4 (36:18):
I like that you say that the best you could
do at your level. I think because there is this
there's this concept that you can have a movie that
looks like shit, and if it sounds bad, people will
think it's bad. But if visually we get away with
a lot. But I do think that there is a
bit of a happy medium where as long as you
understand what your sound is doing and you can explain
(36:39):
to the audience why it is the way it is,
you know, like through found footage or getting rid of
something and doing narration. Like as filmmakers we instantly connect
with that, but as just a random audience viewer, all
you need to do is feel like I understand what's happening,
I can get I can get into this, I'm going
with it. And with found footage, I think that's one
(36:59):
of the most important things. And adding in those layered
sound effects could be a huge saver as well.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
Yeah, you know, found footage is such a.
Speaker 8 (37:08):
Blessing sometimes because if you do have messed up sound,
you can throw a static and glitch sounds all over
it and the audience goes, oh, yeah, that's just part
of it, because that's what I'm here for, is that
kind of messy, that messy look, and so there's a
lot of you know, I don't I don't really know
how to describe it. Almost just like pitt or what
do you call safety nets? Yep, a lot of safety
(37:31):
nets with found footage. But then the flip side is
because of the genre, you also have a hard time
being able to set up certain shots because you have
to explain why the camera would be in that position
and why it's not moving, and so as far as
like effect stuff, Holy crap. That's when it's like, I
don't even know how I'm gonna pull this off visually
because I have to explain why the character is sitting
(37:52):
here staring at this thing for a long time to
get this really cool shot.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
You know.
Speaker 8 (37:58):
That's where I think a lot of people say found
footage is easy to make, and then when they go
to the visual.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Site, it's like, no, it's not.
Speaker 8 (38:04):
There's there's actually a lot of things you have to
figure out because you have one camera source and it
should be moving. It should be running away from this thing,
not just staring at it still. And that's that's where
it gets tough.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
Dylan makes a fantastic point about the fact that the
reality of your sound design and the reality of any
of the issues you may have in sound design are
all exaggerated by the visual, and they're all meant to
play together. You're only doing the sound design to play
(38:38):
with the visual. So as you're thinking about what you
want this movie to sound like and what this movie
needs to tonally be, it's important that you stylistically match
it with what you're showing visually. I think that that's
hard to explain because every movie is so different and
(39:00):
it's a challenge for a lot of us to figure
out what is that sound scope supposed to be When
we're working in independent film, and so if it's visually
not necessarily you know, a blockbuster. Look, we're running on
cameras that maybe aren't the most high end cameras, in
expensive lenses. Maybe you're shooting on an iPhone, maybe you're
(39:21):
shooting in many you know, we're shooting in all sorts
of different ways. Finding a way to match that tone
with the visual is super important. While I was speaking
of super while I was working on my Super eight
short film Tip Tap, which I think you can see
on YouTube. I don't know if it's up right now
but when this podcast comes out, but it will be
up very soon. It's called Tippity Tap. And in that
(39:44):
short film, Sean Ashley and I made a Super eight
film where we you know, it's him walking around and
the visual is obviously super eight, So the audio needed
to kind of match the score, needed to kind of
tonally play with that. And that was really challenging because
you can't make it bad, but you can't make it,
(40:05):
you know, super clean, or it's not going to fit
the style. So figuring out what your style is and
how the audio can play off of that properly is
It's it's a challenge that you as the filmmaker have
to take on and not take lightly. Taking that lightly
will make your movie feel cheap, I think most of
(40:26):
the time. And so if you take it seriously and
you really think about it and analyze what is this
supposed to sound like, it can elevate your film. I
talked to Michael Parow next about his movie Self Driver
and what he was able to do with sound. So
at what stage in the process do you start thinking
(40:47):
about sound design, what the tonal value of the movie
is going to be, where score is going to be,
how you're going to get the most out of your
actual you know, the audio from your performers. Is that
something you think about early? You just let your sound
person do it, or you're like, we'll get it in
the mix.
Speaker 7 (41:07):
Well, yeah, for self, Driver was a really unique situation
because it was basically the whole movie is inside a car,
and we didn't have room for or money really to
pay like an on set sound person, So I did
all the sound myself, on top of all the other
hats that was wearing. But it was, you know, because
it's a contained environment, it was fairly easy. We'd wired,
(41:30):
we had four mics in the car most of the
time and like one of those new thirty two bit
float recorders that you don't really have to worry about peeking,
and so as long as the signal was coming in
and we had like them relatively close to the actor's mouths,
we got pretty good audio most.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
Of the time.
Speaker 7 (41:48):
But it definitely was hugely important to me, and as
we were in prep, figuring that system out was a
big part of our prep process us finding the best
place for the mics, finding the like sort of best system,
and the best way to run the car. In a
funny way, we found like if we were going too
(42:11):
fast or if the fans were blowing in a certain direction,
it would fuck things up. Oh yeah, So we did
a lot of like prep and research in in the
like weeks leading up to our shoot. But yeah, sound,
you know, it's a cliche to say at this point,
but the sound one hundred percent is more important than
your picture.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
And so that we.
Speaker 7 (42:35):
We got the cleanest audio we could. But our movie,
because it takes place inside of a car, we wanted
to sort of paint a picture of a world outside,
and most of that was through audio. You know, we
get glimpses of what we're looking at or what the
driver sees, but a lot of the world is brought
in by the sound design.
Speaker 4 (42:56):
Was this something you thought about during the writing process, then,
if this sound is happening around, is it in the script?
Is it like something that you thought, Okay, we're not
gonna get away with showing this because I don't have
the budget for it, but I'm going to I'm going
to make sure that we know it through the sound
design for sure.
Speaker 7 (43:12):
For sure, I think there was a lot of it
in the script, and then just sort of me knowing like, Okay,
this takes place in an industrial neighborhood, so picturing like
industrial sounds, and then this is downtown at night, so
like hearing clubs pulsing through the windows, and like just
people chattering and parties going on and stuff like that.
(43:34):
That was all definitely like brewing while I was writing
and while we were in prep, and it helped a
lot in the edit, sort of knowing already what scenes
were going to sound like because I could pull our
like pull sound effects and record some stuff and drop
it in.
Speaker 4 (43:49):
Did you do folly and pull sound design yourself or
did you have someone doing the mix and master.
Speaker 7 (43:56):
That was our biggest price tag on our film was
our sound guy. I knew, like that's sort of the
one area that I wasn't confident in my own skills.
I love it, So we spent like like literally half
of our budget was paying like a sound guy to
do that work. And he did an amazing job. He
recorded all all of our folly was recorded. We don't
(44:17):
have a single can sound effect.
Speaker 4 (44:19):
Oh that's awesome.
Speaker 7 (44:20):
We wired the car up and we went spent an
afternoon just driving around collecting sounds from the car that
we used to film. So it was like genuine to
the yeah, legit sounds from it. Yeah, yeah, we I
mean the movie would not be we wouldn't be talking
about this movie had we not gone.
Speaker 2 (44:36):
With that guy and he hadn't done such a great job.
Speaker 4 (44:39):
That's awesome, and I totally agree with the Good Exorcist.
I ran into a million issues with sound. It was
like the biggest problem and taught me valuable lessons about
like make time for it, put it in the budget,
figure it out. And it also made me realize that
like for me personally, score is a quarter of the movie.
(44:59):
Like score for me saved my ass because having someone
doing score who was really good allowed me to cover
up some of the issues that I had and made
the audience go like, this is really like there's a
lot of skill in this right here. I'm like, it's
not me that is this score.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
The score.
Speaker 7 (45:15):
That's another really good point. Like as I was writing,
I was putting together I like to just set up
a Spotify playlist and just put sort of inspirational stuff
that feels like part of the tone of the film
that I'm picturing. And so by the time then I
usually pull all those tracks and put it in as
temp score for the edit. And so by that point
I had the most ambitious temp score you could possibly
(45:38):
have for a movie of our size. You know, like
all this our movie was based very heavily on like
eighties anime sound tracks. That's nice, awesome, all this super
yeah super danse music. And I got really lucky and
a friend of mine is a composer, and he was
free and looking for a movie to you, and he
(46:01):
loved the cut I sent him, and you know, yeah,
he gave us a lot of We paid him a
little bit, but not nearly what.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
He was worth, and he just he hit it out
of the park. And yeah, one d the score is
doing some heavy lifting in my movie.
Speaker 4 (46:18):
The one of the things I always say is like,
there's no I always feel like I don't pay my composers,
any composer enough, because they're so like they're invaluable. They
I could pay them the entire budget, I could pay
them millions and millions of dollars and they would still
be worth it. Like there they are the key to
making me look good, and same with you know the
(46:40):
sound I've I did sound on my own movie for
my last one, and because I wanted to learn because
I was so bad. I was like, I the first
one was so bad based on the person who did
the mix with the next one. I I ended up
getting rid of that person and doing the mix myself
in like three days for The Good Exorcist before it
was due for out By Southwest and then for Greywood Plot.
(47:02):
I was like, I'm going to learn how to do
this so I can communicate what I need and I
understand the way it works and the tricks. And that
was that was invaluable for me since then, Like being
able to actually communicate what I need based on having
done it was massively helpful.
Speaker 7 (47:18):
I think that's like sort of my the biggest thing
that I think the most important thing about making movies
on any level, but on this level especially is knowing
as much as you possibly can about every department, not
because you should like be doing other people's jobs or micromanaging,
but just so that you can communicate what you want.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
And you can.
Speaker 4 (47:39):
We don't have the time or money. We don't have
the time of money. You got to be able to
just go like, hey, man, I need you to make
sure that the decibels are at this level for this,
because that person's gonna yell.
Speaker 7 (47:48):
You know what I mean, like or like if you
want it to sound a certain way, like you understand
where mike placement is going to get you that sound.
And yeah, there's so many in the camera department too.
I think just being able to communicate quickly and clearly
is so valuable, and the only way you can do
that is by learning either on the job or doing
(48:10):
tons of research.
Speaker 4 (48:10):
But yeah, it sound is one of the most challenging
ones to Sound is so challenging to research because you
don't naturally have that available to you. It's just such
a specialty thing. So you're not like, ooh, I can
run around and mess with microphones and try them out
in different settings. But honestly, like, if if you can
go in and test microphones or even talk to a
(48:31):
sound person, you know, I highly recommend it to any
low budget filmmaker.
Speaker 5 (48:35):
Just go play.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
It's huge.
Speaker 7 (48:37):
Shadow someone for a day, you know.
Speaker 4 (48:39):
Practicing adr that's been another big thing I've done to
try to learn what are some of the ways to
communicate how we can get better ADR is not necessarily
to the sound person who's helping me with ADR, or
if I'm doing ADR myself, I know how to get
the proper recording, but practicing so I can figure out
how to get performances out of my cast.
Speaker 7 (48:57):
I mean, for that's another like skill for like an
actor being able to perform in that environment versus when
you're on set and like get the same emotion, get
the same tone as such a hard I don't know
how they.
Speaker 4 (49:12):
Do it, but when they pull it off, it's like
a magic trick.
Speaker 2 (49:16):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (49:16):
And when I when I work with actors who maybe
aren't as you know, in low budget filmmaking, some of
my people aren't as experience. I mean, shit, my mom's
in my.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
Movie, you know.
Speaker 4 (49:24):
Like I have people who have never acted before. Ever.
One of the things I've done with them is like
actually play the line back what they said in the moment,
even if it's like terrible audio, just play it back
and have them say it like three times in a row.
Speaker 7 (49:39):
Yeah, I think, I mean, I feel like that's how
they used to do it. You'd like hear the line
and then repeat it, and then hear the line and
then repeat it.
Speaker 4 (49:45):
I think that's a trick that I've learned from I
was an animation director for many years, and an animation
we would have to do that where someone would deliver
a line but then we needed to change it a
little bit, but like the animation still had to match
because we had animated it. So we'd be like, Okay,
so we need you to deliver this line at about
this pace, but you just need to go like up
on this word. So we play it back and then
(50:06):
be like, just go up, just go up, just to
get that timing flawless. Right, Yeah, So do you have
any So it sounds like for the most part, you
guys had it figured out when you went in, and
you know, there were the little issues with the sound
or whatever. But are there any like bits of advice
you would give a filmmaker when they do have sound
(50:26):
issues or something that could help them in post while
editing to maybe fix a sound cover something.
Speaker 2 (50:36):
Oh that's a good question.
Speaker 7 (50:39):
Well, I'll say that technology is crazy now, so there's
tools that, like a lot of them are you have
to pay for. So like our sound editor had all
the plug crazy plugins that you could ask for. But
even like Adobe has that new podcast AI Pod Adobe
Podcast where basically it'll take your audio and then take
(51:01):
everything with AI somehow strip out all the background audio
and just make it sound super super clean.
Speaker 2 (51:09):
And that was crazy.
Speaker 7 (51:10):
Like I used that a few times in our just
edit to clean up a few refer bits and it
was totally usable.
Speaker 4 (51:19):
The technology has getting incredible. I was at a I
was filming some interviews at a conference, a massive conference
that was packed, and they had these little d DGI
law of microphones that have noise cancelation like built into them,
and I was like, these this audio is going to
be unusable. Like I went into it thinking like we're
(51:41):
never going to use this footage because it's going to
be terrible. And I got back to the editing bay
and started working, and I was like, oh my lord,
this is beautiful. Like this audio is better than I
ever could have got any other way. I cannot believe
how good this is.
Speaker 7 (51:54):
So the technology is there. I think a good piece
of advice like got was like if things stay concerned,
then you can get away with like a noisy environment
if for some reason you can't clean it up. If
you keep this audio sort of consistent across the scene,
and you're not hearing the edits, so you can you
can have a louder background and it can be sort
(52:16):
of an a noisy environment if you justify that in
the sort of diegesis of your film. As long as
you're not hearing the edits, and as long as the
general like thing is consistent across your scene, then you
can get away with more noise than I think you
You would think when you hear a clip on its own,
(52:36):
it sounds like terrible, But if you're in the sort
of flow of a scene, it's not the worst thing
to have some noise as long as you're not hearing.
Like I said, but hearing the edits is the thing
that kills kills a scene and.
Speaker 4 (52:50):
Takes Yeah, that's where room tone and getting sound in
the moment is. So I've just I've learned to make
sure you get that because then you can say things
with that background noise, a little bit of tonal value
faded faded over a long period of time can like
totally save you.
Speaker 7 (53:07):
Yeah, and just getting more I think, more and more
more atmosphere than you think you need, like I usually
have even in my edits, like three or four levels
of or three or four different tracks of background audio.
Some of it's just a room tone, and then some
is like the traffic outside the window, birds outside the window,
like a fridge running, little things to just help fill
(53:29):
out the scene and make it feel like a real environment.
I think if you sit down and hold your breath
and listen, even in a quiet room, there's a lot
of sound, and when you're recording clean audio in a
room with just room tone, you're not getting that. Like
there's more sound in actual life than we get on
a recording of a scene usually, and so filling that
(53:52):
out helps a lot and just sort of making something
feel alive.
Speaker 4 (54:00):
Consistency in film is something we don't talk enough about,
in the fact that with low budget filmmaking, it's incredibly
challenging to stay consistent, to keep your style consistent throughout
the film, to keep effects consistent, to keep performances consistent.
All of us are challenged by this more than any
(54:24):
more than the big budget movies are, because they have
so many people watching out to make sure that everything's consistent.
We constantly have to watch it for ourselves, so sound, visuals,
everything can lose consistency. And I think that Michael made
a great point about how consistency will help tone throughout
(54:46):
the entire movie. If there is a specific value in
your music, a specific value in the audio quality, all
of those things can help the audience become comfortable and
forget their watching movie. And that's at the end of
the day, what we're trying to do when we're telling
a story is to have the audience completely forget that
they're just watching a movie, but to rather get especially
(55:10):
a low budget movie. We mostly want them to forget
they're watching a low budget movie, but instead start to
think about how they're watching something fun, how they're being entertained,
or how they're being scared, how they're being emotionally pulled
from place to place, and that consistency is incredibly important.
Thank you so much to my guests Alex kuwalm Spooky Madison,
(55:32):
Dylan Brown, and Michael Perow for coming on the show
and talking about something that is It's a challenging topic
to discuss because we aren't all necessarily focused on the
sound design. We're focused on making a movie, telling a story.
Getting visuals and sound is just one little piece, but
it's a very important piece. Thinking about your score, thinking
(55:54):
about what the tonal value of your movie is layering
those sound designs. There so many takeaways from these conversations
that I think filmmakers, low budget filmmakers can can learn
and utilize in their next movies. I am using this
information in my movie right now. I learned things listening
(56:18):
to these folks talk about how they use sound that
has helped me with Get That Dick and the other
films that I'm working on right now, because it's hard
when you're running and gunning and you're running sound and
you're having to think about how you're going to do adr.
(56:38):
It can become overwhelming. And the sound, like I talked about,
is so important to me that it's hard for me
to let go of it sometimes and to just let
it be and enjoy the process of making the movie
when I know that the sound is going to be
a challenge throughout. Thank you so much for listening. If
you want to support the show and hear new episodes
(56:58):
ad free, head over to patreon dot com slash Flush Studios.
It helps keep the lights on here and gives you
early access to all of the stuff I'm working on.
There's going to be some behind the scenes from my
movie Get That Dick and there's going to be. There's
a lot of great stuff. There's already eight hundred posts
up there. It's a dollar a month or like ten
eleven dollars for the year or something like that. Subscribe
(57:20):
to the Patreon. It helps support this podcast and other stuff.
And again, thank you so much to my guests for
coming on. Make sure to go check out all of
their movies and I'm very excited to see what all
of them work on next. Until next time, keep kicking ass.
If you want to be a part of this show,
make sure to head over to the Flush Studios Instagram
(57:42):
and leave me a message, or the Patreon or the
Flush Studios discord, or my Facebook, wherever you want to
reach out. That's how you can touch with me, or
flush Studios at gmail dot com is a great way
to reach out as well. If you're a filmmaker who
wants to be on the show, you can reach out
to me through there. I have got more incredible filmmakers
(58:04):
throughout the rest of the season. I did an interview
with the cinematographer on my short film Little Luca and
the Big Deal, Dennis Collo, and he just recently put
out a new show on screen Box called The Trouble
with Tessa and he it was a fantastic conversation, even
if I did kind of screw up the audio. Ironically,
(58:27):
audio consistently pulling me down and being the challenge to
overcome in this process of creating art and telling stories.
But until next time, keep creating, keep experimenting, and as always,
stay rebellious.
Speaker 8 (58:46):
Low Budget Rebels is brought to you by the indie
film Hustle Network, recorded at Flush Studios headquarters in tropical Atlanta.
Produced by the film Daddy, Josh Stifter, Hella Babooz,
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