Film Festival Sound Design Award — Madrid IFF 2023 | Sound Design for an Indie Comedy from Japan
- Sound Reformer / yamakaWA
- Aug 8
- 2 min read
Our sound design work on an independent Japanese comedy earned a Best Sound Design award at the Madrid IFF 2023 (Film Fest International), an indie film festival based in Madrid, Spain. The director attended the ceremony in person, and the win is listed on the festival's official winners page (linked below).
This article walks through what the film needed on the audio side, and what that means for other independent directors — especially documentary filmmakers — considering audio post-production for a festival submission.
The film: A Recommendation for Euthanasia
A Recommendation for Euthanasia is a comedy feature and the director's debut film, following a man who joins a fictional "three-day euthanasia tour" in Okinawa. It was shot without a dedicated production sound mixer on set, which is a common reality for first-time independent directors working with a small crew — and exactly the kind of situation where audio post-production ends up carrying more weight than usual.
What the sound work actually involved
Most of the film's audio was recorded with a mix of lavalier mics and shotgun microphones, and nearly every piece of dialogue needed some degree of cleanup and rebalancing before it was usable. With a small-crew, run-and-gun shoot, that's expected — the goal in post is to make the inconsistencies disappear.
The work broke down into three main areas:
Dialogue editing and cleanup: Because the film relied on lavalier mics and shotgun microphones interchangeably depending on the scene, matching tone and presence across cuts took repeated passes, not a single blanket process.
Ambience and location sound: Much of the film was shot on location outdoors, which meant every scene carried its own layer of ambience — traffic, wind, room tone — that had to be managed so it supported the scene instead of fighting the dialogue.
Mixing: Balancing dialogue, ambience, and music across a feature-length comedy, with the pacing and tone of a comedy in mind rather than a drama.
Why this matters for other independent filmmakers
A lot of independent films — fiction and documentary alike — are shot the same way this one was: a small crew, limited or no dedicated sound recording on set, and audio that gets fixed in post rather than locked during production. That's not a flaw in the filmmaking; it's simply the reality of working with a limited budget and crew.
What changes the outcome is how the audio post-production is handled afterward. Festival programmers and audiences notice unclear dialogue and inconsistent sound far more than most other technical issues — and it's one of the more common reasons submissions get passed over, even when the story and picture are strong.
Sound editing and mixing for your own project
We work with independent directors — including documentary filmmakers — preparing films for festival submission, handling dialogue editing, ambience cleanup, and final mixing for feature and short films.
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