Beso Kacharava – Georgian Audio Post-production Tbilisi Professional Talks About His Experience Working with Georgian Film Production Companies
Beso is a sound designer, specialized in film audio post-production and video games. Beso started his career in Vancouver, Canada after graduating from Vancouver Film School and moved afterwards to Tbilisi, Georgia to run his own private audio post-production facility. He worked on handful of movies, TV shows, animations, commercials, TV ads, and video games. His services cover all audio post-production spectrums, ranging from sound editing, foley recording, ADR recording and up to 5.1 mixing. Beso runs his private audio facility inside Georgian Film’s complex.
After partnering up with GDS TV and “Sarke Studio” my newly assembled team and I have joined their post-production team to do sound for 2nd season of their 3 major TV-Shows. The challenge was big, scary and exciting at the same time as I had to create brand new team and be a team leader to do sound for 29 episodes with each being 45 minutes long in about 4 months. The genres were completely different from each other: post-apocalyptic survival thriller, historical drama and finally, World War II historical drama packed with gun sizzling action sequences similar to “Saving Private Ryan” and “Band of Brothers”.
First challenge was to train a team including interns with small or no experience in sound, recruited locally from music or audio schools, not only teaching them how to do sound for film, also training them to gain skills and understanding on how film industry work nowadays. Second and the biggest challenge was scheduling. As today’s film making business demands, time was really expensive and valuable especially because our projects were scheduled to air and we couldn’t miss any milestone or go past any deadline, as every deadline was crucial and strict. Third and very important challenge was not to sacrifice quality at any cost. We had daily creative brainstorming sessions to make creative decisions and not compromise on storytelling with sound.
Paradox – Paradox is a post-apocalyptic survival horror with broad types of vampires in it. We had animal-like vampires and smart human-like vampires and that was our biggest priority during pre-production. We had to consult with screenwriters and directors to define general sound of those creatures as we needed starting point. We had to hire and record several artists and metal band singers to record growls, squeals and screeches and when humans couldn’t do it we would use pigs and other interesting sounding animals to achieve it. Also general atmosphere of environment was pretty challenging to create because we were limited to what was and could be in there at that time and space.
Tiflisi – Tiflisi was a project every sound team would dream to work on. We had great opportunity to re-create sound of objects and atmosphere which does not exist in this era and had so much to experiment with. Despite it being much less action-packed as its “little brother” Kerchi, every gunshot should have been heart melting as it was being associated to a very dramatic moments in the movie and in the history.
Kerchi – Kerchi was the most challenging project in the season and I’d say most challenging show I have ever worked on. As there are many great sounding movies and shows in the same genre, it was really hard to create something new, better or even getting close to the quality of its ancestors like “Saving Private Ryan” (one of the best sounding movies in the history in my opinion). Every frame of this show was hard to plan, create and execute for sound team. And being in the tight schedule made it even more challenging. We had to record, edit and mix every gunshot, bullet whiz and body movement of hundreds of soldiers without compromise.
Overall, this season was an exciting experience working with great people and inventing new ways to create content in a very short amount of time with near to no sacrifices to the quality.