“The Voice Recorder” is in Sound Design
The sound design for our new short “The Voice Recorder” is finally over and the film will now be undergoing coloring process to be ready for final screening at its upcoming premiere at the Bridges theater in Westwood.
My creative and multi-talented friend Arno Stephanian from Magic Sound Studios who is also the folly artist behind a series of successful television series including Once Upon a Time in Wonderland and The Conversation was nice enough to help me out with sound design of our production.
Given the nature of the story and with regards to the name of the short “The Voice Recorder” you could guess that the sound design was the most significant aspect of the project in post production stage and I have to admit that Arno did a fantastic job in bringing together all these little pieces of sound bites, follies and ADR’s combined with all the diegetic sounds coming out of the stereo of the car and the voice recorder itself.
Beside Arno I had my great friend Nathan Galovan, who is a comedian at UCLA radio, to join us in reading the diegetic radio announcements and all I can say is that he did a phenomenal job recreating the voice of an early morning radio talk show host spreading positivity for drivers stuck in 405 traffic!
Besides these two I can’t thank my talented actress Vaneh and two devoted other actors Robert and Marcia for taking the time to drive all the way to East LA in order to finish the ADR’s before our deadline.
This was by far my most in depth sound design experience with respect to post production sound design and I can’t begin to emphasize enough about the impact of this process on the final product. As a detail oriented creative, Arno puts his heart and soul in my project and just by comparing the before and after stages one can realize the amount of work done to produce the best possible impact out of this.
The Voice Recorder is the story of a recently immigrated Iranian film student, “Sayeh Mashreghi,” who has a hard time adjusting to the realities of her new lifestyle in the United States. When Sayeh’s professor disrespects her Iranian heritage, she leaves the class furious, but later in a tire shop, waiting to fix her car’s flat tire she finds a recording of a conversation between the same professor and the Dean of her division, both of whom make direct racial jokes about Sayeh’s ethnicity in private. Determined to use the audio against them, she is inadvertently confronted with her own bigotry, which much to her surprise is not any better than that of her professors.