A Sweet, Sweet Sound

One of the projects the team I'm working with took part in was creating a makeshift sound booth. Being that our production is working in a warehouse, we tended to get a lot of reverb whenever we recorded our scratch dialogue. As such, me, my 1st Assistant Editor, and our coordinator banded together to create a booth.

After throwing around a few ideas on how to craft it, we settled on making a 10'x10'x10' metal pipe cube covered in moving blankets. Excited to begin, we headed to Home Depot; a place we'd end up making more trips to than we would've liked over the next few weeks. With us being more versed in film and not DIY construction, we ran into some bumps in the road, including buying incorrect pipe fittings, misjudging exactly how high 10 feet truly was, and miscalculating the number of blankets we needed to cover the gigantic cube. However, after a lot of sweat, tears, and driving around town, we finally finished our beautiful cube.

Aside from the light chemical smell the blankets permeate the air with (don't worry, we've been airing it out and using Febreze), the cube has made a huge difference! Before we had our "booth" we had to be very cautious whenever we recorded. We couldn't bump the levels up too high and our editors weren't too thrilled with the nearly unusable, echoing scratch that resulted whenever our actors yelled too loud. Now when we record, you would've thought we were in a real booth! The sound is crisp and clear, with us only having to pause every so often when a particularly loud motorcycle plows down the street next to us.

I'm quite proud of our booth, loving dubbed "The Cube" by our production. Though our resources may be limited, our team continues to amaze me with their resourcefulness whenever a need arises.

(P.S. I would've posted a picture, but I wanted to err on the safe side since we're sharing the space with another company.)