Meet Jason Downer | Sound Mixer and Editor for Film and Television

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

Hi Jason, what do you think makes you most happy? Why?
What makes me happy is helping others. I’m a fairly basic person, I have my family, hobbies, and as I get older, naps. Naps are great, I had no idea when I was younger. So my needs are essentially met.

I find that my work in film and television sound helps achieve someone else’s dream, and I find that very fulfilling. It can be very difficult to get a clean recording on set, to remove unwanted background noises in post production, and balance the whole audio shebang in the final mix. There’s a lot of common mistakes and pitfalls that I see. Being able to use my experience and skill set to insure a polished finished product that fulfills my clients’ vision is incredibly rewarding.

Everyone has a dream, and being able to help bring someone close to that is wonderful.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I think what excites me the most about my work, is constantly learning about the complexity of the human mind. There’s an immense amount of signal processing that goes on to separate and identify the swirling collage of noise we hear everyday and make it useable information. Hearing your kid’s voice over the TV, an ambulance siren on the highway, or when to flip over a pancake because the sound has changed. It’s absolutely amazing the computation that’s going on all the time.

There’s an equation I’ve loved since I learned about it in high school called the Fourier Transform, or as I like to call it, The Big Ugly Equation, which essentially through a lot of additions and multiplications breaks down a sound into individual tones. Well, there’s this spiral part of the inner ear called the cochlea that does the exact same thing biomechanically. And then those signals go to the brain which processes them more and can tell your if you’re hearing a baby crying or just the cat wanting attention.

This morning I bundled up and went outside into a light snow storm and I could hear the sizzle of the falling flakes as they landed. Though I was bundled up and quite warm, the more I listened to it the more I felt a chill. Does that make sense? My mind knew that sound and was subconsciously letting me know it was cold out. Amazing what goes on without us knowing.

Those are tricks I like learning about and using to guide an audience, and to suck them into a story.

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?
We’d have dinner with some cool film friends of mine who’d talk about personal stories of their work from with Audrey Hepburn to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

We’d hike to Devil’s Bridge in Sedona, do some sight seeing.

Take ATVs to some see some petroglyphs.

Finally head out to the Watson Lake to have kayak to kayak water fights with plunger style squirt guns. And probably throw some water snails at each other too.

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?
I would love to thank Stephan Schultze, Bryan Reinhart, and Micah Johnson, and Rue from the Zaki Gordon Institute for Independent Filmmaking. Just amazing people. Though the school in Sedona closed a few years back, it has found new life on the east coast at Liberty University.

Every year I had the opportunity to write music for student films and give a six or so hour presentation on the tricks of music and sound design and how to guide an audience by just their ears. Lots and lots of video clips that I still use today when I need to explain a concept quickly to a client.

I got to babble about the stuff I knew and then when working on the film scores I had to really hustle and learn new musical styles and audio techniques. That part was very, very humbling.

If it wasn’t for the opportunity to work with those students I doubt I’d be doing what I am today. I think was a lot like a kind of grad school.

Website: coppercloudmsuic.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jbdowner/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-downer-52497a36/

Other: https://vimeo.com/user6811959