Hunt Beaty is a director, producer and Emmy Award-winning production sound recordist based in Brooklyn. Born and raised in Nashville, this NYU Tisch film school grad spent years studying how films got made — and now he’s made his own.
The short film The Sound of Your Voice was directed by Beaty and written and produced by Beaty, José Andrés Cardona and Wesley Wingo. This thriller focuses a voiceover artist who is haunted by a past relationship as she sinks deep into the isolation of a recording booth.
Hunt Beaty
The Sound of Your Voice was shot on location at Silver Sound, a working audio post house, in New York City.
What inspired the film?
This short was largely reverse-engineered. I work with Silver Sound, a production and post sound studio in New York City, so we knew we had a potential location. Given access to such a venue, Andrés lit the creative fuse with an initial concept and we all started writing from there.
I’ve long admired the voiceover craft, as my father made his career in radio and VO work. It’s a unique job, and it felt like a world not often portrayed in film/TV up to this point. That, combined with my experience working alongside VO artists over the years, made this feel like fertile ground to create a short film.
The film is part of a series of shorts my producers and I have been making over the past few months. We’re all good friends who met at NYU film undergrad. While narrative filmmaking was always our shared interest and catalyst for making content, the realities of staying afloat in NYC after graduation prompted a focus on freelance commercial work in our chosen crafts in order to make a living. It’s been a great ride, but our own narrative work, the original passion, was often moved to the backburner.
After discussing the idea for years — we drank too many beers one night and decided to start getting back into narrative work by making shorts within a particular set of constrained parameters: one weekend to shoot, no stunts/weapons or other typical production complicators, stay close to home geographically, keep costs low, finish the film fast and don’t stop. We’re getting too old to remain stubbornly precious.
Inspired by a class we all took at NYU called “Sight and Sound: Film,” we built our little collective on the idea of rotating the director role while maintaining full support from the other two in whatever short currently in production.
Andrés owns a camera and can shoot, Wesley writes and directs and also does a little bit of everything. I can produce and use all of my connections and expertise having been in the production and post sound world for so long.
We shot a film that Wesley directed at the end of November and released it in January. We shot my film in January and are releasing it here and now. Andrés just directed a film that we’re in post-production on right now.
What were you personally looking to achieve with the film?
My first goal was to check my natural inclination to overly complicate a short story, either by including too many characters or bouncing from one location to another.
I wanted to stay in one close-fitting place and largely focus on one character. The hope was I’d have more time to focus on performance nuance and have multiple takes for each setup. Realistically, with indie filmmaking, you never have the time you want, but being able to work closely with the actors on variations of their performances was super important. I also wanted to be able to focus on the work of directing as opposed to getting lost in the ambition of the production itself.
How was the film made?
The production was noticeably scrappy, as all of these films inevitably become. The crew was just the three of us, in addition to a rotating set of production sound recordists and an HMU artist (Allison Brooke), who all agreed to help us out.
We rented from Hand Held films, which is a block away from Silver Sound, so we knew we could just wheel over all of the lights and grip equipment without renting a vehicle. Wesley would would primarily focus on camera and lighting support for Andrés, but we were all functioning within an “all hands on deck” framework. It was never pretty, but we made it all happen.
Our cast was incredibly chill, and we had worked with Harry, the engineer, on our first short Into Quiet. We shot the whole thing over a weekend, (again, one of our parameters) so we could do our best to get back to our day-to-day.
Also, a significant amount of re-writing was done to the off-screen voices in post based on the performance of our actress, which gave us some interesting room to play around while writing to the edit, tweaking the edit itself to fit new script, and in the recording of our voice actors to the cut. Meta? Probably.
We’ve been wildly fortunate to have the support of our post-sound team at Silver Sound. Theodore Robinson and Tarcisio Longobardi, in particular, gave so much of themselves to the sound design process in order to make this come to life. Given my background as a production recordist, and simply due to the storyline of this short, sound design was vital.
In tandem with that hard work, we had Alan Gordon provide the color grading and Brent Ferguson the VFX.
What are you working on now?
Mostly fretting about our cryptocurrency investments. But once that all crashes and burns, we’re going to try and keep the movie momentum going. We’re all pretty hungry to make stuff. Doing feels better than sitting idly and talking about it.
L-R: Re-recording mixer Cory Choy, Hunt Beaty and supervising sound editor Tarcisio Longobardi.
We’re currently in post for Andrés’ movie, which should be coming out in a month or so. Wesley also has a new script and we’re entering into pre-production for that one as well so that we can hopefully start the cycle all over again. We’re also looking for new scripts and potential collaborators to roll into our rotation while our team continues to build momentum towards potentially larger projects.
On top of that, I’m hanging up the headphones more often to transition out of production sound work and shift to fully producing and directing commercial projects.
What camera and why?
The Red Weapon Helium because the DP owns one already (laughs). But in all seriousness, it is an incredible camera. We also shot on elite anamorphic glass. Only had two focal lengths on set, a 50mm and a 100mm plus a diopter set.
How involved were you in the edit?
DP Andres Cardona singlehandedly did the first pass at a rough cut. After that, myself and my co-producer Wes Wingo gave elaborate notes on each cut thereafter. Also, we ended up re-writing some of the movie itself after reconsidering the overall structure of the film due to our lead actress’ strong performance in certain shots.
For example, I really loved the long close-up of Stacey’s eyes that’s basically the focal point of the movie’s ending. So I had to reconfigure some of the story points in order to give that shot its proper place in the edit to allow it to be the key moment the short is building up to.
The grade what kind of look were you going for?
The color grade was done by Alan Gordon at Post Pro Gumbo using a DaVinci Resolve. It was simply all about fixing inconsistencies and finessing what we shot in camera.
What about the sound design and mix?
The sound design was completed by Ted Robinson and Tarcisio Longobardi. The final mix was handled by Cory Choy at Silver Sound in New York. All the audio work was done in Reaper.
