With that said, let’s move on to the other aspects of the audio of the film.
The audio effects were a little all over the board. The effects for the crucial gunshots for the killing of Kevin by Ray and, later, when Ray takes his own life were excellent. However, early in the film, Ray gets into a scuffle at a club with no sound effects being added to the fight. At other times throughout the film, one of the main characters will be playing Xbox or clearly watching TV, but no sound effects have been added. As such, these little touches need to be put in place.
The music for the film was quite good for almost all of the film, with a pretty good rap soundtrack that really got you into the heads of these urban youths. The transitions on the songs worked pretty well, except for the scene where Ray and Shawn pull up to Kevin’s house to kill him. At this particular song, the rap song that has been playing suddenly cuts away, which feels very awkward. Either the song needs to fade out at a less awkward place in the song or background sounds should be used for this short drive to heighten the intensity. The only time where the music was ill-suited for the scene was in a segment where Chris is at the graveyard talking to Carlos’ grave. A very clearly looped piece of music plays in this scene that sounds like it was quickly cobbled together in Soundtrack Pro or GarageBand. This is a very long scene, although it is cross cut with a scene between Ray and his older brother in prison, and really needs music that suits it better than this very looped track. Probably one of the best economical solutions to make good sounding music in a situation like this would be either with Smartsound’s SonicFire Pro 4 (available for Mac or PC) or Sony’s CineScore (available for PC), both of which retail for under $200. (You can read our review of SonicFire Pro 4 here.)
Use of Budget
For the $14,000 they had to put into this film, the filmmaker and his crew made all the correct choices, including trying to get some decent audio equipment. Unfortunately, due to the fact that the audio provisions turned out to be insufficient, more money will probably need to be allocated for redubbing (unless a studio is willing to either donate or provide on deferment their time and equipment).
As I can testify myself, for future films, the filmmaker will clearly know to do more comprehensive tests of audio equipment in the environments he intends to shoot in and budget accordingly.
Lasting Appeal
I absolutely wanted to watch this film again after I had finished it the first time and I absolutely wanted to show it to people. The audio issues, unfortunately, do lower the ease of rewatchability and also the number of people who would be willing to sit through the entire film. If these are fixed, the rewatchability could easily be up there with movies like Requiem for a Dream and American History X.
Overall Comment
This is an amazing film debut from Michael Shahin. A compelling plot, realistic characters, awesome camerawork, and the fact that it’s rooted in truth make it a film that needs to be seen. Currently the film has a number of audio problems, but if redubbing is performed on it, it could easily become a classic film. In fact, if the redubbing were implemented and the more minor music/effects issues corrected, this could become our highest rated film to date.
