Jarome Matthew's Blog

I am working on post production for a DVD for some fitness products by Zenzation and they also asked me to assist with the production, so I had Tobin Smith work on the video shoot with me and found a location on the beach for a nice background:

There was a lot more seaweed and junk that the day before when I checked the location, and all we had as this kids rake to clean it…

We used a wireless headset mic to avoid background noise and get a clean sound while the instructors were doing a lot of movement. It sounded great despite extraneous noise. At the start of the shoot the city was cutting down trees, luckily that didn’t last long enough to kill the shoot…

I really don’t know why so many people are giving this film such bad press. I was totally blown away by it after seeing it about a week ago.

As a sound designer, one of the elements that stood out for me was the incredible sound design by Cameron Frankley that breathed new life into the machines that I grew to love since the original film by James Cameron. The sound in this film penetrated right into your gut and created such intimidation for an evolved new side to the machines that have taken over the world, as they should now that we are in the future, right in the middle of the apocalyptic battle that we had only seen glimpses of in the past.
As you’ll hear in the intro on the main website, when many of the larger machines commence their destruction of the humans, a threat to their existence, there is this new buzz of electrical energy surging that is perfect to convey just how much trouble your in when they appear! It is really only appreciated properly in a good theatre [I saw it in the best one in Vancouver].

The look of this film was also gorgeous, shot on a special never before used film stock to give it this bleak apocalyptic feel. The Director apparently also gave the cast and crew a copy of the famous “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” That inspired Blade Runner to give them an idea of the kind of world he wanted to create. And he succeeded in every way in doing that in my opinion.
We have to give credit to The Matrix series for doing this so well first…

But a good film requires more than just ear and eye candy, and as a fan of the series, I felt the film did a great job of bringing the story into the future in an exciting way that really impressed me.

So don’t listen to the hype, and see it in the theatre! It’s my fave of the year so far, even beating out Star Trek which I am usually an even bigger fan of…

A feature film I worked on last year, ‘Sweet Amerika‘ was released last week in theatres across Canada. It will further be released in the UK and across Asia, then on DVD in a few months. It’s a multi cultural drama  based on real events about a Sikh grocery store owner who is kidnapped and tortured by four Americans who mistake him for a Muslim.

We went to see it in the theatre over the weekend, and although I was pleased with how the sound came out, the sound in the old theatre we saw it in was so bad that it ruined the experience. 2 Channels instead of one, terrible old speakers, weird, compressed audio with a lack of dynamics, and a dark, dingy screen made it a disappointing experience. I have blogged before about how I’ve been doing more film work because of the declining quality of music playback devices, so it was kind of ironic that it sounded so bad. I heard it’s playing in a good theatre now, so I’m tempted to find out what it really sounds like.

I could go on with all kinds of stories about the massive amount of work and trials involved during the process of doing sound design on this film, how Maria’s screams and non dialog audio had to be done in my studio despite ADR being done previously, and how other location audio had to be used because ADR was never done for other key scenes, but I would have to write a novel to talk about all that.
And even though it was a very impactful experience in many ways, It’s a year later, and I’m done with this chapter of my life, so check out the many decent reviews of the movie out there, and see it if you can.

I look forward to the next film project being a better production, and playing in theatres with great sound.