The moment we finished colour grading the picture we moved straight onto sound. Over the years I have heard people talk about the tendency of producers and filmmakers in general to lean their budget towards the picture, the look, the feel the executing and let the sound somehow “take care of itself” I must admit that I made this mistake with one of my short films and vowed never to repeat it. So Malgosia Corvalan (Co -producer) and I went with a company called Dream sound in Warsaw, their quote was much higher then many of the other ones but as it turned out absolutely worth every penny. I never expected to learn from this process as much as I did. Not only the really technical aspects about sound but also about collaboration. I think the most important aspects about art or any collaboration is as I call it ’ The care factor’. You can’t make somebody care, and I think in fact you can’t pay somebody to care. Caring for a project is to make a personal investment in it to take pride in your work and try to really achieve the best result. and that is definitely what happened with Tomek, Marcin, and Kacper. Caring also translates into moment by moment decisions. Its like building a house of cards each move depends of the previous one, that every decision is the ground work for the next. If you make 'poor cutting corner choices' that will eventually influence the whole process. (I digress).
Having invested really an enormous amount of everything in Belladonna it was such a relief to know that the sound was in great hands, from the recording of few of the key music tracks, to the music mix, to sound mixing, and foley. I knew this was going to be the case from the moment we arrived and meet the boys at WFDIF a Warsaw version of Hollywood. They were working on foley and wanted us to approve their sounds. At this stage we had just finished editing the film and the idea of watching the film in detail AGAIN was almost overwhelming, kind of like torture, I had to get over myself pretty quickly. (We have shot some footage for behind the scenes for the making of Belladonna, it is really funny a little like the world of Being John Malkovich)
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