The Los Angeles-based sound supervisor and re-recording mixer led every stage of the film’s audio, on set and in post, in a year that has put his name in the sound design category on three continents.
Peter Zongting Li has won Best Sound Design at the 2026 Los Angeles Film Awards for the short film We Are One. The award, announced in the festival’s August 2026 cycle, is the latest in a run of international honours for a sound supervisor whose work has spent the past year moving steadily from festival programmes into commercial release. Peter has worked in audio for media since 2015 and is based in Los Angeles, where he takes projects as sound supervisor, production sound mixer, re-recording mixer and composer. It is an unusually wide brief. On most productions those titles belong to four different people who meet, if they meet at all, on the dub stage. Peter tends to be the one holding the boom on the first day of shooting and the one who opens the session months later to mix it.
That reach is not a matter of collecting job titles. A film’s sound is largely decided on location, in the choices nobody sees: where the microphone sits, which of the day’s takes is quietly unusable, what ambience will be needed in six months and has to be recorded now, while the location still exists. A supervisor who was not there inherits those decisions. A supervisor who was there made them, and knows what he has to work with.
We Are One is the clearest case of the method. Peter served as sound supervisor and sound designer on the film, and every element of its audio — production and post-production alike — was led by him: recording dialogue on set, capturing the location’s own atmospheres, then building the effects, foley, ambiences and design passes, running ADR, and carrying the picture through to the final mix. The Los Angeles Film Awards jury recognised the result with Best Sound Design in 2026, an award presented for the film and to Peter by name.
The LAFA prize joins a shelf that We Are One had already begun to fill. The film won Best Sound Design at the New York International Film Awards and took another Best Sound Design prize at the Monthly Future of Film Awards. It was an official selection of the 2026 LA Short International Film Festival and screened publicly at Laemmle NoHo 7 on August 3rd, 2026.
Other titles have carried his name into the same category. Solar Eclipse won Best Sound Design Short at the USA International Film Awards, and the animated film Guan won Best Sound Design at both the Touchstone Independent Film Festival and the Eastern Europe Film Festival; the Digital Griffix Film Awards nominated him in the same category for Solar Eclipse and for Guan. The Last Sonata, on which he also served as sound supervisor, was selected for the 2025 LA Short International Film Festival and screened at Regal LA Live on July 27th, 2025.
His longest-form work to date is The Pool Boy, a two-hour-seventeen-minute crime, comedy and romance feature on which Peter worked as sound supervisor and re-recording mixer. The film premiered at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on August 29th, 2026 and arrives as a paid release on November 8th, 2026 on Amazon Prime Video, Google TV and Apple TV, with a free run on Tubi, The Roku Channel, Peacock and Plex beginning December 10th, 2026. A feature of that length is where the discipline is tested: two hours and seventeen minutes of dialogue, atmosphere and score have to hold a single acoustic logic, and the mix is the last place to discover that they do not.
Asked about the approach, Peter describes sound less as a department than as a continuous decision that starts before the first slate and ends at the last frame of the mix. A room tone that sits a shade too bright, a line crowded by an effect that should have thinned out a beat earlier, an ambience nobody thought to record: none of these are set problems or post problems, they are the same problem heard from different chairs. Having sat in all of them, he catches them sooner — which is the sort of work audiences rarely name, and reliably notice.
Peter Zongting Li’s portfolio is at www.peterlisound.com.
