Skiles Portfolio - Sound Design

Deanna Skiles Audio Production

In Solitude With Me “Movie Trailer”

Film Sound Design

Summary I did the ADR mixing and Re-Recording work on the Senior Thesis film, In Solitude With Me, directed by Josh Chumbley.

Using both ideas from the Producer Aida Rodriguez and the Senior Sound Designer Austin Atkinson, I developed my own take on the film trailer.

I was more interested in the emotional take of the visual cuts than trying to explain the intricacies of the film in such a short time. There’s no time to discuss the black-market implications of the clinic, nor the space to explain why the main character decides to go under the knife himself after his wife dies.

These made other renditions very creative and different, but that wasn’t the direction I wanted to go. My take attempts to paint this short story as an unstoppable descent into madness.

Mixing Notes In my mix, we follow the main character, who is spiraling deep into depression as his wife’s condition disintegrates medically.

We see a small montage of his experiences and memories as this journey takes place. The doctor’s words haunt him and keep him up at night with their severity. He has flashbacks to when she was healthy, and this triggers the memory of one of her final letters to him before going into her implied coma.

She reminds her husband that he’s something worth fighting for, but her words are distorted by his internal pain and muffled by his overwhelming memories.

The procedure itself – the removal of the brain to “preserve” the person’s essence – is irrelevant to this angle of the storytelling. We simply see a sad situation unfold, where a husband is being torn apart by what he is witnessing: his wife – and her gentleness, her warmth, her love – is dying, and this reality is only amplified by the harsh, cold diagnosis from her doctor.

The decay of our emotional health when going through heavy loss in our lives is undeniable, and I’ve felt this pain that I see on the main character’s face before. Your world is shattered. The tease that I intended for this version was simply this: we don’t know if he’s able to claw his way out of this pit, or if he surrenders and becomes selfdestructive.