Since the technical and creative process of ELR is identical to the creative process of TRW, I will practice the latter.
When I received the film, it had a very distinct structure to the script, as the director decided to change the technical script. I felt that there were shots that didn’t square with each other and that some deep sound design work was needed to connect these lapses.
The first thing I suggested to the director was to add more music in the scenes of higher intensity, that is, to add dimensionality left over (Murch, 2000). After she agreed, I contacted my collaborator Harry Charlton to solve the problem. We spent the month of October around music composition, meeting after meeting until the music was finalised and closed.
Once the music composition was finished, the sound editorial would begin, the first stage being editing the dialogues. These were spotty – given a very severely executed shoot by the sound operator, many dialogues were stilted, inaudible and poorly recorded. A recurring problem was that there were 3 microphones on the shoot – one boom and two lavaliers – but the sound operator recorded in stereo. So November was entirely dedicated to cleaning up audio and noise. It was painful.
Then it was time for effects and ambience. Nothing to declare. It was quite a fun process. The environments have rural and traditionalist tinges – nature sounds, local radios, and distant church bells echoing in a river. In terms of sound effects, there was very little intensity. Just underwater shots. I think what fell shortest was the foley. Given the lack of time and money, the recordings were done on the spot.
Compare the reference version and the edited version without mixing.