Sharing to help any aspiring filmmaker who may be considering an expensive and life draining investment in their first film.
NEVER cut corners on sound. Your film will die. No amount of post production magic can save some mistakes in production sound. It's always more expensive to try and fix it later, than to hire an experienced sound op with good gear. NEVER invest in camera and picture quality over sound... unless your making a silent film. Why? How many people here have watched silent films? Don't you just love the beauty of 4k footage and no dialog? (rhetorical sarcasm) Yet... how many people here have listened to an audiobook or podcast this year? The reason is that your story IS a sound element. The image is sexy but a great shot with terrible sound ruins the film. Great sound and a bad shot is also not great... but you can do more with creative video edits, cutaways, b roll, etc.
I say this because YET AGAIN a filmmaker has called my audio post studio and asked for help.... and we look at the film, and report back that without ADR the project will never be it's best.. and may even be completely unwatchable. Of course they can't afford ADR. Come to find out, they can't even afford $10/hr to do a needed dialog edit and de-noise. What are they left with? A film shot in 4k that has great camera work... and is completely unwatchable because they refused to hire a location sound person for over 50% of the movie. They found a person who donated a few days, and a couple of scenes sound great. But... they wanted to invest in the camera package and catering instead... and now 2yrs later and hundreds of man hours.... the film is pronounced dead in edit. Out of budget and no ability to fix the most important element in their narrative... the characters dialog.
Don't let this happen to you.
NEVER cut corners on sound. Your film will die. No amount of post production magic can save some mistakes in production sound. It's always more expensive to try and fix it later, than to hire an experienced sound op with good gear. NEVER invest in camera and picture quality over sound... unless your making a silent film. Why? How many people here have watched silent films? Don't you just love the beauty of 4k footage and no dialog? (rhetorical sarcasm) Yet... how many people here have listened to an audiobook or podcast this year? The reason is that your story IS a sound element. The image is sexy but a great shot with terrible sound ruins the film. Great sound and a bad shot is also not great... but you can do more with creative video edits, cutaways, b roll, etc.
I say this because YET AGAIN a filmmaker has called my audio post studio and asked for help.... and we look at the film, and report back that without ADR the project will never be it's best.. and may even be completely unwatchable. Of course they can't afford ADR. Come to find out, they can't even afford $10/hr to do a needed dialog edit and de-noise. What are they left with? A film shot in 4k that has great camera work... and is completely unwatchable because they refused to hire a location sound person for over 50% of the movie. They found a person who donated a few days, and a couple of scenes sound great. But... they wanted to invest in the camera package and catering instead... and now 2yrs later and hundreds of man hours.... the film is pronounced dead in edit. Out of budget and no ability to fix the most important element in their narrative... the characters dialog.
Don't let this happen to you.
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