Warning – Sound Mixing May Cause ADD

Joey Daoud

Joey Daoud is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. His past films have appeared on Netflix, The New York Times, and National Geographic. He is also a YouTube creator across multiple channels with videos garnering millions of views. In his free time, he likes to climb mountains, scuba dive, and brew unique coffees.
Mixing Table

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

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