This is the home stretch – the last cycle of sound design. For eight days I’m back in the post hallway/cave, sound designing my own movie.

I appreciate the importance of sound. An audience can forgive bad images, but not bad sound. But for some reason, I find myself unable to focus for long periods of time, roaming the hall to find other burnt out classmates to waste time with. Fortunately, I’m not a bad influence. They feel the same way – it’s hard to focus on sound.

I don’t know if it’s because you have to listen to every potential piece of music and sound effect, as opposed to scrubbing through a video clip. Or the tasks being more tedious.

A lot of the process is finding the best sounding piece of dialogue (boom or lavalier mic) and filing in the dead space with background noise to keep a consistent noise floor. This is important to create realism and mask the cuts, but it’s not my first choice for fun.

All I can say is I’m glad there’s people like Richard Portman.

Photo by f1rwb DClik