All of this happened more or less at the same time. In early February 2003, I went to work digitally cleaning up a scene in which an actress's wireless microphone was visible. Frame by frame, I removed the offending content, then editor Marc Wade matted a background from another shot so that my slightly messy clean-up job was smoothed out. While this was going on, we hired a sound editor to start going through the audio, removing any stray sounds (helicopters, crew noise, me yelling "Cut!") and adding sound effects where required. This film depends a lot on sound, as the villain in the story prefers to hang out on the roof, where the only thing we hear are his menacing footsteps. I had actually recorded said footsteps - along with some other sound effects - back in my home with my New Zealand crew the previous June, during the weekend break in filming. This stuff was used, filtered, edited, and put in place.

Meanwhile, I used my own knowledge of Color Correction to go into the footage and start adjusting brightness and color levels across the whole film in order to get a cohesive look. As the story takes place all during the late afternoon, and as we shot that story throughout the day over the course of two weeks, obviously some of the shots needed to be tweaked in order to match the others. This was mostly pretty easy, if time-consuming (it would take several minutes sometimes for the computer to render a color-corrected scene). However, there were a couple of exterior shots which were filmed so late in the afternoon that the walls of our white location house were tinted a deep yellow, and that was a nightmare to fix. It required a bit more than just "digital bleaching," but in the end it looked all right.

While all that was going on, one of the most important and exciting parts of filmmaking was going on too: Composing the Score. Although at first I was not sure my film needed a score, it was clear once we were done editing that it did. So I didn't think twice: I immediately contacted Christopher Farrell, an enormously talented film composer who did the score for my first project Foreign Correspondents. Because Claustrophobia was being made for a much lower budget than ForCor, Chris decided it was best to write something that he could perform himself, using a myriad of synthesizers and sampled sounds of himself playing various instruments, from violin to percussion to odd noisemakers. Developing the music for a film with a good composer is one of the most enjoyable (if at times frustrating, in the same way that a puzzle is frustrating) experiences one could ask for, in my opinion, and after a couple months of meetings with Chris, going back and forth and determining what was the best sound and instrumentation for this film, we had a finished score.

Let's not forget our other visual work, namely Titles. My good friend and former CalArts classmate William Lebeda, who did some astonishing titles for ForCor, was happy to come back on board and designed a rather more restrained opening and closing credit sequence for Claustrophobia. An extremely creative and thoughtful artist, Bill is always fun to work with, and came up with a look and feel to the credits that was both subtle and clever. Meanwhile, a crucial shot late in the film was in sore need of some digital trickery. I left it up to Lucas Young and Daniel Crothers, two of my Kiwi crew members, to do themselves back in New Zealand. Without revealing too much, I will say that it did involve adding some digital blood to a handheld shot - not the easiest thing to do. But they did it, and they did it expertly.

Finally, it was time for the Audio Mix. Dialogue, sound effects, background noise (birds, etc.), music, and whatever else we could dredge up that would add life and depth to the film all came together at this point. This turned out to be a highly aggravating time. Our original sound editor worked for a soap opera, and right after a couple of days of mixing (which mostly involved music editing), he allegedly was threatened with explusion from his job if he didn't quit our project. Whether or not this was actually true, or if he was simply burned out and in over his head (as my co-producer suggested, just as you wouldn't expect a soap opera writer to be a good feature screenwriter, so should you not expect a soap opera sound editor to be a good feature sound editor), he was gracious enough to turn me onto the nice folks at Serafine Sound, a professional post-production sound house in Venice, CA. After a few sessions with audio mixer Shawn London, which included a realization that the first part of the mix (which had been done at the soap opera studio) was so out of whack that I needed to postpone the Claustrophobia world premiere in order to fix it, we finally completed the mix on May 30, 2003.