Building a sound department from nothing
No post house, no budget line, and a location next to a generator. How one crew solved it, and what it cost them.
The problem was not equipment. Equipment can be rented. The problem was that the production had budgeted for sound the way most productions do, which is to say at the end, as a fix.
What the team did instead was move the money forward — hiring a supervisor before the shoot rather than after it, and giving that person authority over locations. It is a small structural change and it altered every day of the schedule.
The generator problem
Half the schedule sat within forty metres of a running generator. The conventional answer is to loop the dialogue later, which is expensive and, in a language with this much tonal information, lossy.
They shot around it: reordering the day to put dialogue scenes in the two windows when the generator was down, and using the rest for coverage. It added four days. It saved considerably more than four days of post.
Sound is not a department you can hire in November for a film you shot in June.
The production’s sound supervisor