Shrine
October 17, 2023
The nightmare of teenage years, an experience we’re all familiar with, in Shrine is captured through Natalie’s perspective, as the conflictive process of overcoming the mourning of an important friendship while navigating through the passage from childhood to adulthood and the in-betweens of a not-so-linear sexual awakening.
As the editor and sound designer for SHRINE, the creative process of the project started with clear guidelines from the beginning of the pre-production as the director’s vision was determined by several elements from Giallo’s film style and mostly influenced by Dario Argento’s Suspiria which made the process of building the proposal inclined towards achieving the feeling where suspense and gore meet in the middle. Considering color light switches and the supernatural forces that seem to be hidden but human, I tried to keep the transitions as smooth and believable as possible. A lot of different shots and takes were made so the possibilities in terms of montage were as wide as they could be, also organizing the footage, audio files, and stills was key in giving us room to make mistakes,drag, cut, reorganize footage, and find our way again into the narrative.
In terms of sound design, I must say that is overwhelming the amount of importance it has to make a movie successful and I learned that the hard way. Recording with spare time, doing extra takes of every dialogue, every room tone, and possibly every crazy idea we have for it to be used for building the ambiance marks the difference in making the diegetic universe work in the final cut.
On the other hand, syncing every single scene was a time-consuming task that later on, would help us reorganize and ease the narrative, being that said, cuts to black, cutaways, and slow digital zoom-ins and zoom-outs were the chosen types of cuts that fitted the most to achieve the desired feeling of frantic pace of the supernatural forces haunting her when needed. I would like to also emphasize that experimenting with morphing effects and generative AI was a fun part of the process, even if it ended up not being a viable alternative for the morphing of the photo. Testing different types of typography styles that resembled the inflated balloon aesthetic was a tough challenge that I am proud to say I managed to overcome.
Above all, the main lesson I learned from this experience was that there’s perfection in the process. Not everything you envision at first is achievable nor it’s destined to be done in our self-imposed demanding timelines. We need to cherish the process, the frustrations, and the mistakes made along the way, that’s the true long-lasting lesson of all of this.
– Isabella Montoya
