We have shared a number of videos from audio post specialist Jonah Guelzo covering a range of techniques in audio post production using Pro Tools. In this 32 minute video tutorial Joah works us through the techniques he used an friend his brother and friends put together for the annual 48 Hour Film Festival and is participated by countless cities in the U.S. and all over the world, competing for a chance to be screened at the Cannes International Film Festival in France. In this project Jonah was the sound designer / re-recording mixer and production sound mixer for the short film, “The Switch”. Over to you Jonah...
In this Pro Tools Expert post I am going to take you through a behind the scenes look at what it takes to sound design and mix a film over a weekend. I’ll spend some time to break down the key components that flesh out a film’s soundtrack. From cleaning up dialog, to cutting background ambiences, designing key effects and transitions, performing footsteps and cloth movements from my keyboard sampler, and spending the critical time to shape the soundtrack through the final re-recording mix process, there certainly was little time to spare.
For the film itself, the criteria was simple… sign up a team and come the Friday evening of the beginning of the event, you receive a specific genre to abide by as well as a specific prop that must be included and likewise a specific line of dialog to be interweaved. Everything has to be done from scratch and a final delivered short film from 5-7 minutes needs to be received 48 hours later on Sunday evening.
We got the genre of sci-fi and our prop to incorporate was a hair dryer and the must be included line was “From now on I call the shots.” Immediately following the kickoff event we began to brainstorm and by midnight we had enough scripted to begin shooting the first couple night time sequences where our main character Jon arrives on scene to investigate the “anomaly”.
We had a small close knit crew of friends about six people wide. I handled production sound, and my brother was on camera co-directing the project. We finished the night scenes just before the sun came up Saturday morning at 6 a.m. We all headed off to bed for a few hours of sleep to then all convene late afternoon to finish up the remaining day time scenes. We filmed in a vast wheat field full of incessant bug sounds, then moved onto filming in two different indoor locations. Late Saturday night Joel began the edit in Adobe Premiere Pro and I went to catch some sleep as come early Sunday morning it was my turn to hustle all day for the final sound design and mix of the film.
We hope you enjoy what we came up with for this year’s 48 hour film festival. Checkout our cities’ chapter of the 48 hour film festival.
We have also featured a number of videos from Jonah following the production process for the full length sci-fi feature film “Norman” that is due for completion the beginning of next year.