A feature film I worked on last year, ‘Sweet Amerika‘ was released last week in theatres across Canada. It will further be released in the UK and across Asia, then on DVD in a few months. It’s a multi cultural drama  based on real events about a Sikh grocery store owner who is kidnapped and tortured by four Americans who mistake him for a Muslim.

We went to see it in the theatre over the weekend, and although I was pleased with how the sound came out, the sound in the old theatre we saw it in was so bad that it ruined the experience. 2 Channels instead of one, terrible old speakers, weird, compressed audio with a lack of dynamics, and a dark, dingy screen made it a disappointing experience. I have blogged before about how I’ve been doing more film work because of the declining quality of music playback devices, so it was kind of ironic that it sounded so bad. I heard it’s playing in a good theatre now, so I’m tempted to find out what it really sounds like.

I could go on with all kinds of stories about the massive amount of work and trials involved during the process of doing sound design on this film, how Maria’s screams and non dialog audio had to be done in my studio despite ADR being done previously, and how other location audio had to be used because ADR was never done for other key scenes, but I would have to write a novel to talk about all that.
And even though it was a very impactful experience in many ways, It’s a year later, and I’m done with this chapter of my life, so check out the many decent reviews of the movie out there, and see it if you can.

I look forward to the next film project being a better production, and playing in theatres with great sound.