Meet Vera Tin | Sound designer & sound mixer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Vera Tin and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Vera, do you have a favorite quote or affirmation?
My favorite quote is a line from the first season of True Detective: “Life’s barely long enough to get good at one thing. So be careful what you get good at.” I like this quote because it always reminds me that life is short in terms of what I want to do and who I want to be, and it helps me stay focused on the important things when facing hard choices in life.

Whenever I encounter some setbacks, I would go back and watch the series. I recently just rewatched the first season again, and I’m always moved by how determined and persistent the main characters are. As a filmmaker, it’s always hard to balance between making a living and telling the stories we want to tell. This quote has been an inspiration to me that life is not that long and I can only choose so many things, and I’m choosing to keep making films and tell good stories with sound design and sound mixing and get better at my craft.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
As a sound designer and sound mixer, my art is telling stories through sound. Unlike some people who have their background in audio and music, I started my path with storytelling from the very beginning. Growing up, I loved all kinds of stories, novels, TVs and movies. Following my dream of becoming a filmmaker and storyteller myself, I majored in Cinema and Television in college and started making short films. During those projects I gradually became in love with sound design and mixing. Which I didn’t expect was working in documentary films after college, and I was responsible for both cinematography and sound. Perhaps what makes me a different sound designer and mixer is that I have the experience of making both picture and sound, and that makes me better understand how the sound I design and mix will support the films and help them become a complete work.

To me personally, story always comes first when I approach the work of sound design or mixing of a film. I’m most proud of all the diverse and powerful stories I have told through sound in the last couples of years. The stories are about an old lady dying of Alzheimer’s, about strangers trying to save each other, about a young lady’s memory of her grandparents, and many more. Of course my education at school taught me a lot of the techniques of sound design and mixing, but the real learning process is always doing it in a project, and another project after that. Every project is different, and every one of them has its own challenges. For example, one film that I worked for as the production sound mixer was shot in a desert, and it was very windy the whole time. What I did was putting windshield covers on all the microphones, and mixing the channels to rely more on the lavalier mics. Moreover, I was also trying to embrace the wind, as we could see it in the picture and the wind has become an element that’s part of the film and story.

Sound is a very important aspect of film and it connects people to the story and its emotion in a subtle and subconscious way. Even though the power of sound is often underestimated or ignored, I’m trying to pay my attention to all the little details and do my best to apply my creativity and ability to tell the story through sound design and sound mixing. Now I have become a sound professional for years, I start to look back on the projects I have done and critique my past work. With the new techniques I’ve learned and more experience I have, looking at and listening to my past work has sparkled inspiration for me on how I would do it differently now. By realizing what I could have done in the past, I also gather more and more ideas about what I can do in the future. So I guess the lesson has always been: learning from the past.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
LA is definitely a cosmopolitan city that has a variety of food to choose from. I would take my friend to Alhambra and San Gabriel for great and authentic Chinese food, and to the lovely izakaya in Gardena and Torrance. Griffith Observatory and Getty Villa are great places to visit for sightseeing, and so are LA County Museum of Art and Huntington Library. If my friend wants a little hike, we can go to Baldwin Hills for a short one or go to Topanga Canyon for some longer ones. I would definitely take my friend to Venice Beach for the sunset, as it’s one of my personal favorite spots. At night, there are several interesting bars that are worth checking out in downtown Culver City.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
First, I would like to dedicate my shoutout to my family and friends, who have always supported me following my dream of being a professional filmmaker, even though some of them might not fully understand what filmmaking really is. They have been unconditionally loving me and believing in me along the way.

I also want to shout out to my fellow filmmakers that I have worked with in the past projects. I have learned so much from many of them, either their talent or their passion, and all I learned from them is inspiring and motivating for me to keep going. Especially all the directors I have worked with, who believe in my audio techniques and creativity, and allow me to help them tell all the interesting stories through sound.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vera.tin.90/