Soundtrack Composition and Audio Repair

The story of Let It Brie's audio is a difficult one full of struggle and challenges. In the beginning, before production had even started, I was asked if I would be willing to compose the soundtrack for the film. This was to be my only involvement in the project, and I waited for the locked edit. When the initial production was finished, the problems began. The set recordings were highly problematic, which was only exacerbated by the work done by the original sound mixer. This sound mixer then promised the director (Anouk Witkowska Hiffler) and I that they would work hard and fix the film audio mix in time for us to integrate the soundtrack and be ready for the screening deadline. With that in mind, I got to work composing the soundtrack using the first mix. I tried to provide as much assistance as I could to the sound mixer through advice on whatever questions were asked, but they dodged showing the director or I an in-progress several times. This continued until two weeks before the screening deadline at which point the sound mixer provided us with their work, which unfortunately proved to be more problematic than the first mix. The director panicked and decided to go another way with the sound and remove the mixer, but this did not fix her problem of not having an acceptable mix. Out of desperation, she asked me to step in as the sound mixer on top of being the composer to fix the work done by the original mixing engineer. I realized with the time left she didn't have another option, so I agreed. Once I got my hands on the mix, I was able to see how truly problematic not only the mix, but the recordings themselves were. The job was done poorly enough that if I were the director, if possible, I'd have reshot the entire film. The recorded dialogue contained horrible bleed from seemingly impossible sources, the gain for each lav mic was completely random and in several cases, the audio for scenes was completely absent. I had considered doing ADR, but there was no time left, and none of the actors were available anymore. I had to go word for word to repair the audio and make it sound acceptable, but scenes were beyond repair. Either way, this mix showcases what I am capable of when it comes to repairing damaged audio recordings, and it also shows off my skills with soundtrack composure!