Area resident works on film

SANDPOINT — Perhaps more than anything else, horror and thriller movies depend on sound design to be effective.

For the film “The Mooring,” filmed only an hour away in St. Maries, that responsibility fell on longtime Sandpoint resident Mike Jarzabek. The musician and sound engineer followed the project over six months, capturing sounds during the actual film production and building off of them as the project moved into post-production.

“It was a great experience filming in an area I was familiar with,” Jarzabek said. “I was actually able to get up to Sandpoint a few times while we were shooting.”

“The Mooring” is a horror/thriller film directed by actor and filmmaker Glenn Withrow. The story follows several girls attending a summer camp in North Idaho who end up pursued by a dangerous killer. As with other horror movies, its sound design is essential to setting up the tension and the scares.

Unlike many movies, however, Jarzabek said they took a more organic approach to the sound design rather than the artificial, computerized strategies favored by many modern movies. After all, since the film takes place among the lakes and woods of North Idaho, it made sense to emphasize that nature in the sound design.

According to Jarzabek, the biggest challenge in capturing the production sounds was making sure the dialogue and incidental sounds were captured clearly while all the distracting white noise stayed out. For instance, the electric buzz of a household appliance or the chug of a generator might seem insignificant, but when putting together a sound mix for a film, it could dramatically impact the feel of the scene.

Once the production phase of the film ended, the long, labor-intensive period of post-production began, during which the raw production materials are polished and perfected. In terms of sound design, the production audio gave Jarzabek a skeleton to work with, and his next step was to flesh it out with additional sounds to enhance the mood and ambiance. Much of that is accomplished through the art of foley, or using similar sounds to stand in for other ones. The clapping of coconut shells, for instance, can be used to approximate hoof beats. He also wrote the movie’s musical score — another important tool in establishing and cranking up tension.

 “It’s just a really amazing process starting from production audio and building up the entire movie around it,” Jarzabek said.

Those interested in seeing the final product to all of Jarzabek’s work can watch “The Mooring” using Netflix Instant, iTunes, Redbox and a variety of other retailers and distributors. The film is rated “R” for scenes of violence and terror, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.