Freesound Forums

Greetings, everyone! We're the post-production team for the indie zombie feature DEAD SEASON, set for release in eight countries between the end of June and the end of July. Our official site is here:

http://www.deadseasonmovie.com/

DEAD SEASON was shot on Eos 7D on Vieques Island, Puerto Rico over 30 days. It was the first film shot on Vieques since the 1963 French production of LORD OF THE FLIES, which was plagued with so many location audio challenges that the entire film was mixed ADR/Looped. Compounding the sound issues caused by the location, the production's sound mixer had to leave a day into filming, so location sound duties passed around the set to whoever was the least busy for any given scene. As you might expect, this created substantial difficulty for the post team.

We knew early on that a successful mix for DEAD SEASON would rely heavily on sound design - so heavily that the use of traditional sound libraries would result in a tired and cliched soundscape. We chose to use as many original sounds as we possibly could, but with no real budget and a compressed post-production schedule, we relied on freesound.org for many of our ambiences and certain foley effects.

DEAD SEASON incorporates three dozen sound effects and beds recorded by the Freesound.org community. Our credits direct viewers to freesound.org/deadseason, which the Freesound team has been kind enough to redirect to a page containing everything bookmarked with "Dead-Season." Each sample from freesound.org is listed on this page.

The DEAD SEASON post-production team also hopes to contribute to future filmmakers in the way freesound.org contributed to our film. As such, we have uploaded 133 sound files recorded and created for our film, from foley to effects to zombie ensembles. These files are available in six packs and total nearly 2GB of 24-bit, 48kHz content. We have uploaded every file as CC BY 3.0. They are available for sharing, remixing and commercial use by anyone and everyone, with attribution.

A sincere thanks to all of you in the Freesound community, whether we ended up using your files or not. While 36 samples ended up making the final cut, our personal attribution lists tell us that we downloaded nearly 200 files for auditioning at various stages of post-production. Know that the creative contributions to this site by many members not listed in our credits fueled and inspired our work even if we didn't end up using your sounds.

We have made a donation to the Freesound.org cause because we view this community as a vital resource for indie filmmakers. If you feel the same, please consider donating with us.

(and see our movie! We are releasing in the US on InDemand and VOD on July 5th, and BluRay and DVD on July 31st.)

Thanks again,

Seth Talley, Supervising Sound Editor/Re-recording mixer/sound designer
Scott Friedman, Composer/Sound Designer
Loren Semmens, Producer/Editor/Screenwriter
Adam Deyoe, Director/Producer/Screenwriter

That's very cool of you to write. Good luck with the movie; I'll keep my eyes out for it.

Wow! I'm super impressed with the trailer. Great work!

It's worth noting that we used a lot of open-source material (and credited it all). The Conet Project (http://www.irdial.com/conet.htm) makes a few appearances, as do a couple orchestral recordings from musopen.org. We've even got a public-domain recording from archive.org in there. All in all, it was a really rewarding experience.