The Black Boy Who Thought He Had It All

I was the Sound Designer and Post Production Audio Editor for a short film written by, directed by, and starring a Penn State senior B.F.A. Acting student.

The Black Boy Who Thought He Had It All from Penn State Centre Stage Virtual on Vimeo.

Creative Team

• Director: Jalen Martin
• Video Editor: Sydney Smith
• Cinematographer: Pablo Lopez
• Sound Designer & Post-Production Audio Supervisor: Michael Smedley
• Lighting Designer: Faye Ko

What I Did

As the Sound Designer for this film, it was my job to work with the director, Jalen Martin, to bring the world in his head to life on the big screen. The majority of my work mainly consisted of creating a sonic landscape that transports viewers off of their couches into the film’s world.

My post production work was where the film came together. I received a cut of the film after all of the video edits had been made and got to work in Pro Tools. I started by making busses for dialogue, music, and sound effects/ambience. After applying DSP to the busses and routing audio through them, I got to work on mixing the raw takes from set into the sonic world I had created.

What I learned

This was the first film I’ve worked on, and I learned very quickly how different film work is from live shows.

The biggest challenge during this process was that the creative team would make changes to the film after I received a copy, so I had to start from scratch four times before the final cut was ready to be released. While it was frustrating watching my work get scrapped multiple times, I learned how to make my workflow more efficient. I developed a Pro Tools template for the film and saved all of my processing to the busses. I then worked with the video editing team to standardize the way they sent me audio. The result was a four hour reduction in my setup time.

Prior to this system, I had to dig through 25 tracks of audio and separate dialogue, music, and sound effects out from each other. Those tracks then had to get routed and processed before I could start on mixing the film. With the new system, I received six tracks of audio that the video team had already grouped by dialogue, music, and sound effects. All I had to do was import them and rout them through the correct busses.