I've been super buys so this is slightly delayed, but the short film The Reverie we made a while back funded through the crowdfunding website Kickstarter is now available to watch online. You can view our Kickstarter campaign here, and watch the film here!
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Making this film was really enjoyable for me because the sound was so crucial to the story telling - the Director Sam Wildman is very passionate about the sound in his films which became evident to me working on our first film together, Antisocial. Sam and Producer Sian Tomlinson describe The Reverie as a "post-appocolyptic fairytale" - A young girl, seemingly a lone survivor of something, wanders around a deserted town and suddenly hears a radio static coming from a nearby barn. Assuming someone is broadcasting, she picks up the radio and tries to find better signal in order to find other survivors, following the music as it become clearer and clearer.
Although the sound was recorded well, some of it was unusable because there were lots of birds chirping in the background - we are meant to be in a post-appocolyptic world. I did remove these from some scenes using the Spectral Repair tool on iZotope's Rx4 Advanced, but in most scenes I had to mute the sync and build everything from scratch. Every single move and footstep, in the forest especially, took a while to sync up and also make sure they varied so you weren't hearing repeated effects! I also brought in the wonderful actress Joanne Gale to do some ADR for me - I needed her breaths, grunts and struggles to enhance the drama. She was fantastic at this, slipping straight back into character at the click of a finger which can't have been easy for the section where she trips and falls down a hill (filmed, I've been told, by strapping a camera to something and chucking at down the hill?)
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We wanted the radio signal to be authentic, rather than just chucking on a stationary static sound effect, so I brought Sam into the studio with my mum's Roberts radio and had him move around and manipulate the arial behind the microphone and layered these all up. (director-turned-foley artist...?) I of course mixed in some library effects where needed to add a bit more variety. I then needed to mix in and out the music coming from the radio, composed by Miles Hancock, making it clearer and clearer, and in the end gradually removing the 'radio' eq + plugin automation at the end for it to merge with Miles' underlying soundtrack.
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I thoroughly enjoyed working on this, and I would describe the end film as a sort of Art Film because all the elements were so beautifully executed. The Director of Photography Dave White (Head of Cameras at CTV Outside Broadcast) captured some wonderful shots, especially with the rising drone near the end; the grade by Geraint "Geggs" Abbott made a huge impact on creating the impression of a post-appocolyptic world; the music scored by Miles was stunning, with the emotion really being brought out at the end of the film; immaculate acting by Joanne and the editing by Phil Marriott in what must have been a tiring process going through so much footage - the final cut was brilliant put together.
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