Sound Design

Ben-Burtt-Looking-for-Chewbaccas-VoiceBen Burtt would have found it very convenient to head down to the San Francisco Zoo to record Wookiees for this Sci-Fi project George had him working on, but they didn’t exist…yet.

Sound Design  is the process of specifying, acquiring, manipulating or generating audio elements. It can also be a macro way of giving a movie its “feel”. Like the Image System of a movie, the Sound Design can bind scenes, ideas and even characters together in a subliminal way. It can also do the opposite by separating, or providing a distance. This macro approach to a movie is, one of the things, that the Sound Designer/Supervising Sound Editor brings to a project.

 

Web Sound Design 1It’s kinda like making a tree. Unless you already have a tree, you can’t make one. Same here, you have to start with a sound; no matter if it’s just a sine wave, you have to start with something. When we needed a demon voice, we started with this awesome performance…

 

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/81267529″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”80″ iframe=”true” /]

 

Web Sound Design 2

The sound file above contains the original dialog, the pitched (E3), the pitched D3, and then all three mixed.

 

 

 

 

 

Web Sound Design 3

Just a few of the added effects to the pitched E3 dialog.

 

 

 

 

 

Web Sound Design 5

The character becomes possessed with the demon, she tells us about the pending doom, then comes out of it. Her original voice is always in the mix, and it comes through from time to time as she is struggling with the possession  As she comes out of it, we hear her voice slowly return to normal, at the very end she gives the funniest little “huh” as to say, “Well, that was a different.”

 

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/81267530″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”80″ iframe=”true” /]

… it’s getting there