A COLLABORATIVE POST with brad meyer
Supervising sound editor, BOOM BOX POST
In this edition of Inside Sound Design, we spoke with Supervising Sound Editor, Brad Meyer about a recent recording session he conducted for some creature vocals. One of our projects called for a demonic hellscape design, with a myriad of monster species trapped in a “monster hell.” We gathered fellow editors and mixers willing to sacrifice their vocal cords, piled into a room, turned off the lights and started exercising our inner demons. Enjoy the interview and audio demos below!
Hey Brad, could you tell us about the design you recorded these vocals for?
We needed to design the sound of Hell with loads of demons, creatures, and hellions being tortured in the distance. The idea was to convey the sound of constant agony and pain as an inherent sound of Hell itself!
ooo, How did you approach the recording session to convey a chorus of agony?
I knew I wanted a constant wave of torture happening in the background, so I had to get a few larger group records to layer and loop throughout. Almost like a crowd being tortured. I made sure we got the group doing some low, middle, and high end voices for variety. Since we were recording in Mid-Side mode, we arranged the group around the room to capture a sense width. I also wanted to record individuals to use as specific tortured callouts in between lines of dialogue in some of the scenes. Each member of the Boom Box team that participated had their own take on this, so the natural variety in each person's performance did the trick.
Could you share how you went about editing these recordings?
First, I had to cut out all of the laughing we did because of how ridiculous the concept was! (We actually turned the lights off for the group recordings to avoid cracking up while watching each other make these ridiculous noises!) Then, for the constant torture steadies, I cut out the gaps between takes and looped them to create very long files to use in the longer scenes. I organized this in such a way that we had a high, middle, and low layer in the final scene. For the individual callouts, I cut each take down to my favorite few for each person, and then organized them into male and female takes so I could process them accordingly.
Take a listen to the group and individual layers below!
What about the creative effects processing you used to produce the final result?
For both the steadies and the individual callouts, I used the Krotos DeHumaniser plugin. We knew none of the tortured sounds in Hell should sound human, so giving them a monstrous vibe was the first step. However, I processed each file slightly differently. For the steadies, I processed the high end layer to feel like screaming banshees. The middle layer was a more subtle processing just to remove the human aspect. The low end layer I processed to sound like huge demons. For the individual callouts, I divided the processing into male and female. The male recordings got processed low to feel like huge demons, and the females got processed hight to feel like screaming banshees.
Listen to the processed group and individual layers below!
What did you find the most challenging of designing this build?
I think the most challenging part was actually in the mix. There is SO much going on in these Hell scenes that choosing which of the tortured sounds to feature and when was a huge task.
Check out the final result of Brad Meyer’s Monsters-In-Hell design!
Thanks so much for reading!
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