This project was designed for a demo reel piece, showcasing my audio and musical skills. I chose this small portion of a trailer as it leaves lots up to the imagination and had few guidelines for me to follow when designing the sound. I wanted a mix of realistic audio and inspired sound, following visual cues while being creative.
The video itself is slowed to around 80%, while I really liked the clip when I found it, it was very short and by increasing its length it allowed me a bit more freedom when designing the audio.
To start with I worked on the timing of the piece. The video has three notable visual cues, the fade from black, the lightning strike and the character turning to face the camera. Using the timing between the first two events I generated a bpm for the musical elements. This helped with timing the atmospheric synths and risers that fade in and out.
A series of alchemy synths were used alongside some arcade generated loops to form the base of the piece. The musical style is atmospheric and somewhat electronic. This was chosen as it resembles the music used in the actual trailer, and i wanted to test myself to stay true to its nature.
A series of sourced thunderstorm sounds were used throughout the track, adding some atmosphere but importantly matching the visual cue. An interesting decision I had to make early on was to match the audio directly with the lightning flash, or to delay the audio and add some realism. Although this trailer shows a realistic art style, I chose to take a more 'hollywood' style of matching the lightning sounds to the visual, as it adds emphasis to the piece.
All the atmospheric sounds in this track were carefully panned using automation to give a flowing feel and immerse the listener as the sounds move around them.
With the musical elements in place, I focused on some details. Firstly I recorded some general 'movement' sounds by wearing a thick waterproof jacket and recreating while exaggerating the movement of the on screen character. Once recorded I realised the real sound is very high pitched and doesn't fit too well in the dark gritty visuals portrayed. To work around this I duplicated the track and pitched it down an octave, before balancing the audio levels, this helped the realistic sound mix with the world in which the trailer is set.
I was unaware of this game series before this project, therefore I went into this not knowing the setting and storyline behind the game. where this wouldn't be ideal for a professional commissioned project, it played into my hands here as it allowed me to portray the world as i see it through audio without any influence. From this I decided to add a creature sound as the audio cue for the character turning to the camera. The sound itself is an impression of the famous 'Predator' sound, edited and delayed to create more of a growl.
I used a geiger counter sound at the very beginning of the track. This is obviously influenced by the setting of the visuals, which appears to be Chernobyl. The sound is slowed and chopped up to match the slower setting of the video.
As a little detail, I added a track of radio static that runs for the entirety of the piece. This track has a noise gate applied that can be opened and closed to let the audio through and make it audible. This noise gate is side chained (linked) to another channel which has a basic synthesiser applied. This allows me to play a pattern on a synth, which, instead of being heard, simply exists to open the noise gate to the radio static. This saved me lots of time in cutting up the radio sound and organising it into a pattern and if I wanted to change the pattern, I could simply play a new pattern with the synth. The pattern itself is influenced by morse code, mimicking some sort of call for help or radio interference, influenced by the single character on screen.
