WRITTEN BY PETER KAY
SOUND EFFECTS EDITOR, BOOM BOX POST
Working with sound for animation provides us with interesting opportunities to bring to life scenarios totally incomprehensible to our day to day lives. One of our sound effects editors, Peter, was recently tasked with one such opportunity. Peter needed to combine the destructive natural sound of a tornado with the clinical inorganic sound of a machine. Keep reading to hear about his process.
How did you go about brainstorming this “storm?”
The tornado machine would have to first start out like a regular machine and later go haywire and eventually explode. I decided to split up the build into different phases. The first phase would be the machine functioning properly. The second phase would be when the machine starts to malfunction and goes haywire. The third phase would be when the tornado breaks free of the machine and causes havoc. The final phase would be when the machine is turned off and everything stops.
Could you give a step by step process going over the layers in your build?
The first step I did was to create a machine engine steady to let the audience know the tornado machine is working properly at first.
Next I created a small tornado layer. This would eventually grow huge and cause the machine to malfunction and eventually explode.
Just before the machine would malfunction, I added some metal rattling and metal clanging sounds to help convey that there is something wrong.
Then I added a massive explosion for when the tornado breaks free.
To power the machine down, I used the Vari-Fi plug in in Protools.
How did you make the build your own?
I created the build in different layers so I had much more control over what I wanted to include/take out.
What would you suggest to new editors on how to go about building a similar build?
I would recommend having everything in layers so it is easy for the mixer to manipulate. There can be times when clients don’t like a specific element of a build and if that element is baked into a file, we would need to build it completely from scratch. If everything is in layers, it would be easy to just mute the element that is not needed.
Any plugins you used that you would recommend?
Var-Fi is a useful stock plug in to create power down sounds.
Vari-Fi
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DESIGNING A SPACESHIP LASER BEAM
DESIGNING AN ANIME SUPERPOWER TRANSFORMATION
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