Lesson learned. Never, ever attempt to do a whole soundtrack to a film in post production.
I'm just putting the finishing touches to my next short film. Over the last month or so I've been creating the ambient soundtrack and effects. Due to shooting most of the film near busy roads only about 10% of the location sound was usable. Doing the sound in post has taught me a valuable lesson and wasted a good portion of my young life.
Sound is hard. It's time consuming, painstaking and consuming. Luckily there's no shortage of great free sound effects out there on the interweb. Unluckily there is no easy way of finding them. How do you know when you start searching that the perfect sound for your ammo rounds hitting the floor will be a Latvian fixing a gate post? Or that the perfect sound of a body being dragged will be a distorted recording of a cat eating Felix? In my first short I replicated the sound of Gernan military orders over a megaphone using a recording someone had made of their drunk Spanish neighbour trying to smash his own door in at the 3am.
Welcome to the weird world of sound foley. This is not a world that makes sense. You need a good level of abstract logic to work in this world.
It's made me realise that animated films must be really hard to do. When everything has to be created from scratch. They must have the most amazing sound people at pixar and Disney.
The film sounds fantastic and it was worth it. But its hard work and it's something you can easily get lost in while you obsess over the smallest sound effect nobody will ever notice.
So heed my advice and don't do it. Get your sound on location. Just say no.
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