By: Michael Anderson
Shufan Zhang came to Los Angeles thinking he knew what he was there to do.
He had studied producing in China and knew he liked the job: the planning, the negotiation, the quiet panic of making an ambitious idea fit inside a real budget. What he felt he was missing was the creative side of producing. He wanted to get closer to story and performance, not just the machinery that gets a film made.
So producing was the plan.
Sound was not.
That changed during Zhang’s first year at USC, when he directed a short film and found himself spending far more time on post-production sound than he had expected. A practical problem turned into a new way of thinking about filmmaking.
“I started noticing that even a footstep could change how I felt about someone entering a room,” Zhang says. “One layer of ambience could make the same image feel lonely, tense, or strangely calm. That was a pretty dangerous discovery, because suddenly I wanted to touch everything.”
He began studying sound design and re-recording mixing more seriously. The surprise was that it did not pull him away from producing. It changed the kind of producer he wanted to become.
That overlap became especially useful on Empty Lands, a short drama directed by Karim Eldin Elalfy. Set in the aftermath of conflict, the film follows a couple who move into a government-provided home once occupied by a displaced family. The world on the page was much larger than what the budget could comfortably put in front of a camera.
Period wardrobe, locations, props, and background performers all cost money. The answer was not always to find more of it.
A limited number of extras could be repositioned and photographed differently. A vehicle could live off-screen. So could gunfire, distant explosions or activity beyond the frame. Sound could enlarge the world without requiring the production to physically build every corner of it.
“Knowing sound changes the way I think about production value,” Zhang says. “Sometimes the answer isn’t to show more. You just need to know what the audience has to see, and what they only need to feel.”
Zhang was involved in Empty Lands from financing and production through post-production, where he also worked on dialogue editing.
Producing asked him to think about money, time, people and logistics. Dialogue editing brought him down to breaths, pauses and tiny shifts in performance.
The shoot had less poetic problems too: scheduling complications, production pressure and the surprises that arrive the moment a call sheet is printed.
“It was very ambitious for what we had,” he says. “You solve one problem and two more politely introduce themselves.”
The film eventually traveled much further than its modest production circumstances suggested. Empty Lands won the Silver Yusr for Short Film at the 2025 Red Sea International Film Festival. In 2026, it was selected for Tampere Film Festival’s International Competition, where 60 films from more than 7,100 submissions were chosen to compete.
Zhang’s work on the animated short The Pit pushed the sound side of his practice in another direction.
By then, he had become interested in a simple question: why should the audience hear a particular sound at a particular moment?
In one sequence, the protagonist, after being bullied, repeatedly enters the pit, tears away his skin, and begins remaking himself into someone he thinks other people will accept. It is the kind of scene that could easily invite a wall of sound.
Zhang and the director did the opposite.
The mix narrowed toward tearing skin, heavy breathing, an underwater-like tonal layer and music. The goal was not to reproduce everything that might realistically exist in the space. It was to stay with the character’s emotional experience.
Zhang sometimes describes the approach as a “point of hearing”: organizing a soundtrack around what matters to a character rather than everything that objectively makes noise.
“You can always add another sound,” he says. “That doesn’t mean you should. Sometimes deleting something is the more dramatic choice, which is painful after you spent three hours designing it.”
The Pit later screened at the London International Animation Festival, the UK’s largest and longest-running animation festival.
The combination of producing and sound still confuses people. To Zhang, less so.
His commercial production experience taught him to work inside constraints: budgets, schedules, platform requirements and audience expectations. He brings that discipline into independent films, where a creative idea can become impractical very quickly if nobody asks how it will actually be executed. Sound gives him another way to solve the same problem.
Could a scene become stronger without becoming bigger? Is the production paying to show something the audience does not actually need? Could a problem in post have been avoided if somebody had thought about sound earlier?
Working between China and the United States has also exposed Zhang to different production cultures and different ideas about where creative authority sits. He is less interested in deciding which system is better than in understanding what different collaborators bring to the same film.
Recently, he has spent time in feature-film mixing rooms, assisting with technical workflows and observing how larger-scale post-production decisions are made.
Zhang has also been exploring AI and emerging filmmaking tools through his role as a co-lead curator of the Future Reality film program. He is more interested in what happens when more people gain access to the tools of production.
“AI can lower the barrier to making a film,” he says. “It doesn’t lower the bar for making a good one.”
For Zhang, producing and sound are no longer two separate career paths. They are simply two ways of asking the same question:
What does this film actually need?
