Doing sound for independent film – tips, tricks & insights from Tom Disher and Paul Zahnley:

DS = Doug Siebum
TD = Tom Disher
PZ = Paul Zahnley

DS: How did you get your start in film sound?

TD: I had studied sound design and engineering with Dave Budries, who was mainly a theatrical Sound Designer, while I was doing post graduate work in composition. I had also worked on some TV show pilots. But the first time I ever worked on film sound was with Steve Michelson in 1992. He had some pretty interesting clients with really cool films. I just jumped into the deep end there. It was trial by fire!

PZ: I had studied at San Francisco State in the Broadcast Communications Department. That was before it was BECA (Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts), it was BCA (Broadcast Communication Arts). I learned a lot about recording and sound. I started taking a few film courses as I was finishing up. That blew me away. I wanted more, so I went to London and got a Master’s in Documentary Television. In a master’s program, you learn how to make films. Trial by fire. Recording on a Nagra, cutting on 16mm mag, doing it that way. That was my first foray into film sound, during my master’s program.

TD: How many of your fellow students did you help mix while you were trying to get your own film done, Paul?

PZ: Out of the 13 in our master’s program, I had to not only mix, but I cut AD tape editing on 8 out of the 13 degree films. My film is not so great because I was working on everybody else’s film.
 

DS: What originally piqued your interest about indie films?

TD: I had been on the road with a rock band after getting my degree in classical piano. I was tired of being on the road. I went back to study composition in grad school. I was really fortunate to be the grad in charge of their electronic music studio. I had the keys to the studio!!! We had the Synclavier, and a Moog modular system, and this and that. I was looking at film from a musical standpoint. I was creating sounds that would help tell a story. I loved the idea of doing something bigger than just my own efforts.

The first film that I worked on as sound editor/re-recording mixer was called “The Way It Was” – a PBS documentary. The idea was to tell a story through the sound effects of old San Francisco and getting sounds that were both authentic and evocative. When you’re working on an indie film, you’re not just one small cog in a large assembly line. It was between you and a few other people to get the sound together. Working with an independent director, having direct access to that person, developing that strong relationship, and having the ability to share ideas and try things out. That’s what I really love about being in independent film and film in general.

PZ: I didn’t know it at the time, when I was a kid growing up in the Bay Area, but Berkeley and Saul Zaentz, just the tradition of independent film in the Bay Area, I learned how intriguing it was. I learned about it while I was in London. We were studying films that were made over here. I learned the history and just how amazing the independent world was. Almost by chance, once you get involved in it here, you are immersed in independent filmmakers, because that’s where they hang out. It seems like New York and San Francisco are very much a part of that world. Almost not by choice, you are going to be working on independent film projects, big and small, just by chance of working here. Also, during school I was constantly watching every independent low budget movie that I could. Tons of cinema. At the time in the 90’s, people like Jim Jarmusch was directing these amazing films and you were just a part of that. We don’t say no to projects, few and far between that come through the door. Like Tom said, with independent projects, you are very responsible for many departments and you get in deep with the creators. Small teams are challenging but intriguing.
 

Paul Zahnley in Studio D

“Every film is different. Every director is different. There’s not as much time and not as much money. It really depends on the film.You need to have a really good and open relationship with them so that you can decipher what they want.”

DS: What are some of the challenges of doing indie films?

TD: First of all, every film is different. Every director is different. There’s not as much time and not as much money. It really depends on the film.You need to have a really good and open relationship with them so that you can decipher what they want. Sometimes they don’t know what they want. They may be more inclined to know what they don’t want after you’ve done a bunch of work. I think we all have a tendency to want to do our work and then present it when it’s done, but it is vital to communicate regularly as your work progresses.

With an experienced director, their script will have things about sound in it so they will be checking in and giving you feedback. Sometimes you have an inexperienced director that doesn’t know how valuable sound is. Sometimes you have a fearful director that wants to turn everything except the dialogue down too low. As professionals, we need to give them courage and help them to proactively see what they really want to do with their story through sound.

We need to understand how you want to tell your story. It is our responsibility with any film big or small to offer creative solutions and technical expertise that bring out your perspective. With an indie film, we also need to take an extra step to really understand that unique person that is bold enough to make an independent film in the first place! And it’s that unique vision and personal courage that ends up inspiring us to do our best work. That kind of filmmaker creates films that truly move an audience and win awards.
 

Paul Zahnley field recording

With an indie film, we also need to take an extra step to really understand that unique person that is bold enough to make an independent film in the first place!

DS: Yes, it definitely takes some courage. Paul, what are your thoughts?

PZ: Probably the time issue. Sometimes you’re put under pressure to do the work in the same amount of time a team of 12 or 18 would do, but you only have a team of three or four. They want to get it finished as quickly as possible. I always tell people that we can hire 3 or 4 more sound effects editors and get it done quicker. It’s always a time thing.

Then again, there’s a lot of pluses. There are some independent directors that I work with that love sound and want to take all the time it takes. They want to mix endlessly and take the score and completely redo the score on the mix stage. That’s okay, but they have to understand that there has to be an end. There has to be a target. Gosh, if you could tell the composer, Tom, what we’ve done to their music.

TD: Yeah, really true. Lots of times, the filmmaker has hit points they want to emphasize, and sometimes, turning down the brighter melodic elements so we can bring up the rhythmic elements can really improve the impact of a composer’s work. It really saves the composer a lot of headache, and gives the filmmaker immediate control to finesse the score.

PZ: There’s a few challenges. One is they want it done quickly and the other is they want to endlessly play with their smallish budget. Where we could really be tackling creative things or finessing scenes, we could be playing with music for half a week or more. It is a little challenging. We have to educate people on milestones, timelines, how to get through it, and where is the end. I see on studio features or projects from distributors or production companies, they have very specific deadlines of what they have to get through. You can just tell that the creatives in the back of the room are holding their tongue, because they are under immense pressure to get things done. It can be really fun to play with independent creatives and directors, and sometimes it’s a real challenge because you can’t finish.
 

DS: What’s the typical budget?

TD: It’s really such an open question. We have to look at the scope of the film and what needs to be done. We’re not always working on every task. Sometimes we get a film that’s low budget and it’s all laid out as far as they’re concerned and they just need us to do the mix. Sometimes we get a major independent where we’re doing sound design, but it’s going to be mixed somewhere else. Sometimes we’re just doing ADR for major films. Sometimes we’re doing all of it. Sometimes I’m just the composer. How much work needs to be done? It’s hard to put a number on it because there’s such a huge range of possibilities of what can be done.
 

“One thing that is important for directors to know is that we’re on your side, that we’re on your team and we’re going to help you reach your audience in the most powerful way.”

DS: Are the producers or the director usually thinking about post sound ahead of time or do they come to you with a film and haven’t thought of sound at all?

PZ: Both. For independents, I think majority of them aren’t thinking about post sound unless it’s an incredibly creative movie that has a lot of special visual effects or scenes that are special, or an action movie. On the independent side of things, a lot of them don’t have a whole lot of experience, so they don’t know what it takes. They don’t go in thinking about it and preparing for it, they just want it to sound “right”. You know, that magic sauce. Like “hey, can you just mix it”, but they should be thinking about it. Even during script stage. That would be magical if we were involved in the early script stage or even pre production. It would be nice. I would say the majority of them are not thinking about it ahead of time, but we would like to change that.

TD: It would be great if they were thinking about the post-production sound when they were on set and had a decent pair of microphones independently recorded in a good position. Can they grab some ambience and room tone and other unique sounds while they are there? Sometimes we’ll see notes in the script about what the sound design should be- that’s awesome because it means the filmmaker is aware of the power of sound.

Lili Schad heard our sound design on David Brown’s “Surfing for Life” film and came to us with her film about Mavericks. She was really in tune with the idea that the best way people were going to understand the power of the waves in the surfing contest was through sound that was as awesome as her photography.

We were just working on a film recently with a first time director who had shot the film and was really looking for a psychological effect. After putting the film together, he realized that he wasn’t really getting it on the set. He came to us with the idea, can you help us create the psychotic, psychological, tripped out experience into these scenes, through sound? He gave us some notes in advance and we divided up the tasks. We had a dialogue editor, a practical sound effect editor, and I did some whacky psychological effects that were along the lines of what he had described. Even though he wasn’t experienced, he had enough sense to know that the sound would really be a big part of what makes the experience.

We are working on an animation series with creator, Jack Fanburg, called “Trouble in Paradise”. His scripts really call for sound effects. The first episode he came in with had little written sound direction – but he was open to the process, and really grasped how sound design helped the story. By the 6th episode, he was coming in with great ideas in advance about what the sound should be and about how we could amplify this animated series into something that would be humorous, surprising, and effective.

In the end, we’re just trying to help you to tell your story and to do it in the best way that we can. One thing that is important for directors to know is that we’re on your side, that we’re on your team and we’re going to help you reach your audience in the most powerful way. We might not get it right the first time for your taste. We might be over the top, or understated, or too realistic, or too imaginative. The more we can find out about the way you want to tell your story and the things that are important to you, the more we can emphasize those aspects of your film.

DS: Right, sometimes it’s about helping them to see what you’re capable of with sound and then they’ll have better ideas next time of what they can do.

TD: Totally.
 

DS: Are they usually planning on finding distribution or putting it in film festivals?

PZ: It seems like 95% of the time it’s the festival circuit.

TD: Which helps in getting distribution.

PZ: Pushing for the bigger festivals like SXSW and Sundance is the name of the game there. There’s others like Toronto. It seems like with independent projects, they don’t have distribution plans, but sometimes they do get picked up. We had one called “Jinn” that got picked up at SXSW. Then we were on board and remixing a cut in the summer for Orion Pictures or Orion Classics. That was cool and that happens occasionally, but not all the time.

TD: That’s the 1, 2 punch! People going to festivals will sometimes get small distribution offers, but they want to hold out to complete their festival circuit if the broadcast is going to undermine that festival buzz and the opportunity to possibly get larger theatrical distribution, or maybe major television network distribution. Of course the pandemic might be really readjusting that whole perspective too.
 

JINN Trailer

DS: Do they usually have a schedule in mind?

TD: Yeah, but then it changes [laughs].

PZ: That’s usually one of my first questions, “when would you like this finished up?” Because if they can stretch it out over time, maybe we can mix it in with other work and give them a deal, but if they want to book out the editors and then the mixing stage for 4 weeks straight, then it’s going to cost that much more. So that’s one of my first questions, “when would you like this all wrapped up?”

DS: Right, I’ve found from my experience that it’s often tied to the film festivals. They want to get it in a film festival, so they want to get it done really quick. There’s been many times that I’ve run into people that were trying to do everything in a week, and they were panicked about it, and I had to tell them “you realize the same festivals run every single year, right? You can finish the film and enter it next year, it’s fine.”

TD: Yeah I know, right [laughs].
 

Tom Disher in Studio A

DS: Does the director usually keep coming back to you for their next film or is usually a one-off thing?

TD: Yeah, we get a lot of repeat business.

PZ: We also get business from people that have done a film at a big place and we recut a television version or an educational version of some film. Maybe we’ve done a short for them, and they come back for the next big film. It really depends. We get a lot of repeat business. It might not always be immediate, sometimes it’s 10 years later.

TD: We’re all people that love what we do. People that are really inspired about what they do, there’s a certain amount of camaraderie that develops. It’s like you are war buddies. People that went to war together, they’re friends for life, because they went through some serious stuff. Doing a film together, they’re going through some serious stuff. So if someone is going to keep on making films, chances are that they’re going to keep on coming back. Some clients we’ve had for many years and they keep on coming back with new stuff. It’s delightful.

One client that’s come back to us is a Chinese animation team. We did 51 short animations with them in 2013-2014, and a feature film that finished in 2017, and now they’re back with another feature animation – sound design, composition and mix. There was a lot of opportunities for them to work with other people, but we had developed that trust. We had developed that relationship. I think that really ultimately is the thing. That’s what keeps people coming back. You have to do a really good job. You have to be inspired about it. You have to communicate about it. There’s going to be a genuine friendship based on that.
 

Paul Zahnley in Studio D

DS: Are they typically doing stereo or 5.1 or other formats?

TD: We’re just doing mono all the time. Mono and that’s it.

DS: Mono films.

PZ: Yeah, we’re just doing mono.

DS: Mono black and white.

TD: Mono black and white, it’s all the rage now [laughs].

PZ: Unless there’s a deliverable spec from the distributor, which there usually isn’t, because there’s no distributor, I just recommend that we do it in 5.1 and stereo. I have an independent film template that is set up for that. Nine times out of ten, they’re just going to release it on Vimeo and it will only play back stereo anyway. I recommend that we mix in 5.1, and listen down in stereo, and then make adjustments. You know, keeping up with both of those.

That Chinese animated feature wasn’t really that independent, Tom, because I think that animation house is a fairly big studio, but they required DTS:X. In between Randy Thom at Skywalker mixing a Despicable Me feature and they were doing the DTS:X run, the gentleman from DTS:X was coming into our medium sized stage and getting it all ready for that. But mostly 5.1 and stereo. We’re all ready to go with home theatrical Atmos, but nobody’s asked for that yet. So, we’ll see.

TD: One thing that I think is really cool about what you do, Paul, is because of the way you have the 5.1 implemented, I think the stereo mixes come out with a little more depth and it allows you to work with your clients a little more closely in getting things adjusted in the right perspective. How does that work? Is there workflow there or experience that illustrates what I’m talking about?

PZ: I kind of give them a quick education on how a 5.1 track works and the biggest deal about it is having that center channel anchored to the screen at festivals. But if that’s not the case and there’s going to be no festivals, I still do a basic education about it. I talk about dynamic range and loudness and things like that. I think it’s just a little bit of the educational process early on. What is a 5.1 soundtrack and what is a stereo track? No rocket science or secrets about it, I just want to educate them so they know what they’re getting.

TD: Right, I think that gives them a chance to really hear the different elements better when you’re working with them and allows you to point out how things are working in the mix a little bit better too. That translates really well to stereo the way you got it set up.

PZ: It also gets them to listen, especially if they’re inexperienced independents.

TD: Right, right, yeah.

PZ: It’s kind of funny, Doug. Sometimes we’ll do early playbacks or a playback after things are fairly assembled or in the premix stage and the director will take all these notes. Like 5 or 6 pages of notes. So I say, “What are the major sound notes here?” They had never seen it on a big screen, on a 12-foot screen, so they had taken all these picture notes and not enough sound notes. It happens all the time. I’m like “Oh, I thought you were taking sound notes” and they say “no, that’s for my picture editor.” I guess that’s productive. That’s very very common for the independent world, that they haven’t seen it on the big screen yet. And it’s revealing. It actually teaches them a lot. It gets them prepared for translation, picture and sound, for a festival premier or something like that. You find a lot with sound, when you’re actually pushing some air with speakers that have some pretty good volume as opposed to near fields that are right up next to you the whole time, or god forbid having headphones the whole time. Same with picture, when your eyes can take in this expanse and you can scan around a bit and it’s not pushed in your face. It’s just another part of the independent film world, learning in post production.

DS: Well I’ll want to hear a demo of an Atmos film whenever you get one mixed in Atmos. It sounds like you made some serious upgrades to your mix stage.

PZ: Yeah, we have 4 overheads, it’s at the minimum, but it will do. Then we have a renderer, a mac mini renderer. During the pandemic, there was a little bit of a lull there, in the summer, and I spent a couple of days with the Atmos license at home, just in binaural doing some tests. Then actually playing them back in my 5.1 system at home. It’s really revealing how Atmos tracks are sounding. The stereo binaural or just the stereo re-render of Atmos mixes sound a little better than stereo fold downs of 5.1 in the traditional sense. It’s really amazing. I can’t wait to get some more time and get some more projects like that.

TD: They have some psychoacoustic algorithms for the binaural which translate reasonably to stereo, that give depth. In part through phase correlation, putting things back in the room a little bit. Even just coming out of a pair of speakers and certainly coming out of your headphones, which is pretty cool. It does seem to translate exceptionally well, even down to stereo from the Atmos.
 

“It’s really revealing how Atmos tracks are sounding. The stereo binaural or just the stereo re-render of Atmos mixes sound a little better than stereo fold downs of 5.1 in the traditional sense. It’s really amazing.”

DS: Do you have a favorite indie film that you’ve worked on as far as sound design goes?

PZ: I wouldn’t say for sound design, but I really enjoyed this one because we were able to do it in the early days of the pandemic. We got a call from a friend, she works in TV and Film and was in between Marvel shows and got this film from Dante Basco, who is a character actor and voice over actor. He’s Prince Zuko in the Avatar series. He’s from Pittsburg but based here in the Bay Area. Dante had this film called the “Fabulous Filipino Brothers” – it’s a true story about him and his brothers growing up here in the Bay Area. It’s a comedy and was really really fun because we had so many different styles of music from different composers. One of the brothers experimented in experimental music and there’s all this trippy stuff going on. It’s almost a Rom-Com, but it’s a comedy. We actually had people in the studio during Covid last year, but we were being really really careful and safe. Tom recorded ADR from a few of the actors that came up from LA. That was a really fun quick project that I hope gets some traction soon enough.

TD: The ADR for that was a real hoot. They were really animated, really lively. They did a super job of tracking the timing and adding the right amount of energy to each scene. We were looping that stuff so smoothly – it was really fun. It was so great to work with them!

Q Ball Trailer

PZ: A slightly older one was a documentary called Q Ball which was on Fox Sports. Q Ball was a lot of fun sound design wise. We got to play basketball for an afternoon and recorded foley for every palm, every dribble, every foot in the documentary. It’s about a basketball team at San Quentin. That was really fun with sound design.

TD: “Jabberwanky” is not quite done yet, but it’s a really trippy film. It’s quite fun. The film has all these scenes that are hinting at the fact that he’s on some kind of drug. Part of the thing was the director really wanted to bring out those tripped out scenes with sound effects. So I had a field day of creating all kinds of weird voices, and processing some of the sounds that were already in the film from the characters, and then adding other voices. Creating sounds using synthesizers. Using various forms of ambiences and processing them with time delay, pitch warp, and so forth. Accenting frequencies and creating this tripped out kind of wash for what might be going on in somebody’s mind.

On the flip side also, we were working on an independent action film titled “Wrecker”. Talk about a guy with guts! Bryan Peterson studied film and worked on others, but this is his first film. He’s been working on it for 8 years now and he did all his own stunts. It’s pretty astounding what he did.

We only have a total of 4 people working on the sound design. One is concentrating on the fight sounds and hard effects, one is doing dedicated foley and one doing ambiences – there’s a lot of tripped out zombie kind of scenes and weird dark spaces. I’m going to be adding an element of psychological edginess to certain scenes. Not all the time, but there’s these heightened moments in between the fights when you expect something might happen, but then maybe it doesn’t. These zombies are doing untypical zombie things actually. It’s what might be going on behind the scenes that the sound can reveal.

Sound design for animation is something we love. “Tofu” was a pretty large team effort set in ancient China with all kinds of Taoist magic and Alien invasions! “Trouble in Paradise” has all of these epic parodies that take place in all corners of the world with over the top action.
 

DS: Do you work on other things besides indie films?

TD: Absolutely, we work on major Hollywood films and network shows for ADR. We work on a lot of commercials as well – sound design, music composition, VO, mix. We work on marketing pieces and record a variety of podcasts. We do sound design for machinery and industrial things. We’ve created a set of 512 sounds for the Da Vinci Surgical Robot.

We also record bands here, we’re set up to do that. We recorded dialogue for the Japanese Government to make their official translation software. We actually recorded 40,000 lines of dialogue for them. It’s been awhile since we worked on a video game, but we’ve done some interactive pieces recently for PBS and some commercial based projects in Facebook 360 and other formats like that. Anything else, Paul?

PZ: Yeah, anything from a simple piece of voiceover to a multi track film. It’s all there. Tom has been the go-to ADR recordist all through the pandemic too. He’s seen a fair amount of actors come through and do some ADR at the studio. We definitely work on other stuff other than independent films.
 

Tom Disher at the Piano

DS: Tom, I know that you’re a musician and composer as well. How does your approach to a film change when you are working as a composer compared to working as a sound designer?

TD: That’s a really good question, because it’s a totally different mindset. It’s a longer game in general. Doing the sound can be anywhere from a couple of weeks to half a year. On the sound design projects where we did the sound for half a year, I was composing for a year and a half.

It is parallel to sound design – you’re using sound to help tell the story. I think that whenever things become a question about what to do in either case, it’s the same answer. What’s the story and how does the director want to tell it. With music, there’s different ways. You could use a symphony, you could use the inside of a piano without touching the keys for a whole film, as one composer did a number of years ago. You could do it electronically or you could have a band. You could go with pop music or ethnic and on and on. Did I mention that it really depends on what the director wants? [Laughs] Of course, within that context, as Stravinsky said, “limitation creates freedom.” So that when you know what you’re working with and what is going to work stylistically for a film, you need to come with a musical analog as it were – for the characters or the story points or certain environments and whatever the director wants the music to do.

With some directors, we’re certainly checking in scene by scene in detailed sound design, but it’s not really on the same level as the process with composing. Do you like this theme? Do you like this instrumentation? Is this getting that emotion that you’re looking for in your story? Is this slow? Major chord? Melody? Does that feel peaceful to you? or does that feel sad? Because one person’s peaceful is another person’s sad. One person’s exciting is another person’s annoying. One person’s subtle is another person’s Boring? One person’s quirky and interesting is another person’s ridiculous. On one hand it’s about me looking at the music from my creative standpoint of course, but on the other hand it’s really the same thing, what’s your story and how do you want to tell it?
 

DS: Paul are you a musician also?

PZ: Failed musician. I studied music, but after a few years I stopped. I can talk music. I’m not classically trained, but trained enough to hear stuff and talk the talk.

TD: He cuts a mean stem. I can tell you that right now. He really really knows how to get the music to relate to the picture. That’s a whole thing in itself, music editing. Paul really has saved a lot of composers a lot of trouble by fixing things. Yours truly included.
 

DS: Do you have any final thoughts?

TD: I think one thing that we didn’t talk about very much is dialogue. It’s so taken for granted on so many levels. “Of course there’s dialogue.” Dialogue isn’t just the words that are being spoken, but it’s how they’re being spoken. That on one hand is acting, but secondly it also is catching those nuances, on the set hopefully, or else with ADR. Then it’s also finding the way to make sure that the person’s timbre of their voice is right. These actors work on the dialects, and accents, and deliveries, and emotion of the sound. A good director isn’t just going to be looking to see if they hit their mark and had the right expression on their face, they’re going to be listening to how they said their line.

It’s not like being a painter. It’s more like doing art restoration. Especially with indie film. We get really great acted scenes, but it’s not perfectly recorded. It’s not a quiet set, maybe the microphone isn’t in the right place. Maybe the lavalier is acting up and the boom is too far away. Having great sounding dialogue is like the difference between looking at a faded old photograph where you can kind of see the grandmother’s face and seeing that picture restored to pristine high contrast.

Paul is really spectacular at dealing with dialogue and I like to think that I’m pretty good at it too. The idea is that you really need to hear not just the words that are said, but the way they’re being said and the tone. With ADR, it’s finding the right take that fits the lips and sounds good, and has the right amount of balance between accents. Then the mixer can get the tone of that voice to shine through, and fit within the context of the production sound.

When you put that dialogue into the mix, there’s music and sound effects, but you can still hear the tremulation in the character’s freaked out voice. You can hear that sincerity in the way that actor is. By god, they’ve been method acting for weeks. They’ve lost 50 pounds. They’ve been drinking cheap vodka every day and night because that’s what the character does! They do all these things to get into that character and you can hear every bit of that in their voice. Getting clarity in dialogue sound is a cornerstone of what really makes the difference between a great film and an okay one. It allows you to feel the emotion behind the words.

DS: I do quite a bit of dialogue myself and one thing that I notice is that really cleaning up the dialogue and getting rid of extraneous noises that you might not even notice are there, it makes it easy to watch something for a longer period of time. It’s like, if you watch noisy YouTube videos, you can only handle so much of it, because you get this fatigue from it being all clicky with little noises in it and stuff, but if you take those noises out and everything’s smooth, you can watch for hours and not get tired.

PZ: It’s also the same with over compressed stuff. If the dialogue is over processed or over compressed, you can only listen to that so long without feeling tired as well. It’s very strange.

TD: Doug, it’s so awesome to have the opportunity to talk with you! Taking a moment to reflect on what it takes to make a great soundtrack reminds me of why we got into the field, and how much it has enriched our lives. Thanks again for reaching out to us.

You can find Tom Disher here and Paul Zahnley here. You can also find them both at Disher Sound here. I want to give Tom Disher and Paul Zahnley a huge thank you for taking time out of their busy schedules to share some of their wisdom and experience with us.