“Tides is a film about the relationship between light and dark within us all. It is about the person behind the smile, the exhaustion of pretending, and how it is sometimes needed to give in to our darker tendencies in order to survive.”

Mihaela Slabe’s Tides is a film layered in darkness. Opening on a woman in a bathtub, her face full of anguish, it proceeds to show her taking off her façade, letting her darkness run into the water, and sinking into it. The impression is immediate and visceral; this is someone embracing their inner turmoil, wallowing in the darkness that’s hidden behind the face they show to the world.

That darkness is echoed in the film’s design. Washes of ink give the film its texture, from the grays of the bathroom to the near-pitch of the film’s middle third. But a strange thing happens as the blackness envelops the frame. At a certain point, it stops seeming sinister, and starts to feel almost serene.

It’s at that point that Tides becomes something unique and complex, refusing to fall into a simplistic dualism. As the imagery becomes increasingly visceral, the roles of light and darkness become more and more ambiguous, nurturing, consuming and reshaping each other into something new. The process is in turns painful, comforting, and unsettling, but also necessary—as Slabe says in the film’s synopsis, sometimes we need to give into our darker tendencies in order to survive.

I put a large amount of effort into filtering off higher frequencies to give the composition a dark tone, matching the visual themes set out by the animator.

I also made use of the LFE channel while mixing for Dolby 5.1 surround, delivering low-frequency effects to extend an unsettling atmosphere for listeners.

I was brought on to this film project to handle the sound design, mixing, and mastering.

I began by gathering royalty-free environmental SFX that could be used for the project, including things like water dripping, knobs turning, and foley.

Using Logic Pro X, audio effects, recorded vocals, and hardware synthesizers, I populated the sound environment for the piece.

I paid special attention to the reverb effects to give the listener a sense of real-world space and echoes, especially noticeable in the bathtub scenes.

Being that the animation was in constant production and the timing of the sounds frequently had to be altered to align with the visuals, I arranged the composition into blocks for easy manipulation.

Mihaela and I worked back and forth allowing me to get frequent feedback on the sound design and adjust the composition’s timing leading up to the 2016 GIRAF Animation Festival submission deadline.

The animated film can be viewed here, featuring my sound design work.

NSFW WARNING: The animation contains nudity and subject matter which may not be suitable for some.