Let's dive into sound. First, you need to know that I've always had extremely talented sound designers and musicians on board. So I was very lucky to get these people agreeing to work with me. And you're not always going to have that luxury I realized that it's not you know, common to have triple eight Allen's on the no budget shoot that was possible for me because I started out with the Akira project which gained a lot of traction online and allowed me to have people approach me and I could pick actually who I wanted to work with. But if you do not have access to that, try to be smart about sound design. And try to minimize the amount of it if you have to do it yourself and, and find ways for you to be able to enhance sound as much as you can with the resources you have.
Again, one of the software available right now is fairlight from Blackmagic Design, it's completely free. It's presented Great software similar to Pro Tools, but you can actually use it on your own VFX and sound will always go hand in hand. Sound will always enhance VFX and make it feel that much more real. A few examples I have would be example we had the UI in the car when we got the VFX first that wasn't so short with you know, integrating the shot but the ones we added sound, and these little started going on. To become second. You really felt like that UI was part of the world and part of the shot.
One more example is in the Kiera there's Canada shooting laser straight up camera. And when that laser hits you in the face, it really felt powerful. Same thing with the sole satellite, shooting that laser down towards Earth. That sound design that was captured was really what made it work or the bike explosion and the cure and you felt that explosion, with the sound hitting the young kid. It really gels everything together. All this to say is that sound is the most important part of creating a world that works within your VFX.
If you have bad sound, they'll actually lessen the quality of your VFX. So be mindful of that. Also, music is very important for a film, ideally hire a great musician, but if you can't, there are websites available online that can you know, allow you to access music such as premium beat music bed, there's a few other websites that you can access now that will allow you to get music composed, and license for short film projects and nonprofit projects. Ideally, know your music beforehand. If you have a composer on board, try to get that composer to give you the tracks write your edit. It's much easier to edit to a music track than to compose music to something that's already been edited, especially on a temp track.
Do not get married to temp tracks. I've made that mistake on Akira we shot the film edited on this amazing soundtrack from this x Human Revolution. The damn track works perfectly with the Edit I was in love with it. I asked the musician to come on board and compose a new track that fit the style that I wanted and the mood I wanted. However, it never could fit the exact edits that we already had locked down. So we ended up using the time track.
It's something I advise you never to do because it's an extremely dangerous thing to do. You do not have the rights to that track and we ran the risk of getting taken down from YouTube and Vimeo because of the usage of that track. However, the project was a nonprofit project and included link directly to the iTunes of the song so that the artist could make some money while I wasn't making any money and that allowed the project to live online. Again, you can't really count on that because any artist can take the project down based on music rights. And you can see you know, months or years of work wasted just because of that one track overall sound and music is going to be 50% of your project, do take some time to think about what that represents what you want to feel and try to get the right people on board.
Convincing people that are talented is one of the big factor of making your project feel bigger than what you know it should have been in the first place given the budget.