Exactly one year ago I won two tickets to the 24th Florida Film Festival. For the ones that don't know, the Florida Film Festival is accredited as a qualifying festival for the Oscars. Exciting isn't it?At that point in my life, I'd never attended a film festival nor truly knew the workflow of it, let alone the existence of the Florida Film Fest. I invited my cousin and we made it to three different independent films including one international. It definitely left me wanting to go back, but sadly, we only had tickets for one day. I made it a goal to sign up as a volunteer for next year's festival.
And so it happened. One year later, or, two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to help out in said festival.
It was such an amazing experience being able to hear film lovers, filmmakers, producers, press, and others talk to each other passionately about the showings as I did my work. Apart from pre-screening/QC, ushering people to the theater, cleaning tables, and counting ballots I was able to watch four different films, listen to a panel of filmmakers, and form part of Mark Duplass' Q&A.
There is something about the creative freedom behind these independent films that I really love. Yet, it is also known that independent films tend to have tight budgets. That's usually when sound is at risk and in the end, you have to work with what you have. Excellent production sound is key in these situations because "We'll fix it in post" may not be the case for the project. Going back to the films I saw in the festival, poor sound wasn't the case. In fact, it was hard to tell that these films were "independent", even Mark and Jay Duplass' The Puffy Chair which was made with just $15,000; the film was simply outstanding. From the way that they were all shot and edited to the way their sound mix made sense with the picture. All productions were amazing pieces of art.
That being said, there are some films that do not need Hollywood style sounds to stand out. I'm a huge fan of elegant realistic sounds that tend to be more subtle, almost like they all come together to form a musical score. It's fair to say that this is how I experienced sound watching these films at the 25th Florida Film Festival.