The Boom Box Post blog provides insights into the creative sound design process of Boom Box Post's owners and employees.
Viewing entries tagged
kontakt
Creature vocal sound design and creature movement sound design is an essential part of creating believable and immersive worlds in film, television, and video games. It involves creating unique vocalizations for fictional creatures, ranging from terrifying beasts to friendly aliens, as well as translating where this creature comes from, what type of body it has and its size.
Often times, we’re faced with the task of designing sounds that track the movements of certain on screen visuals. These sounds need to be continuous, reactive, and dynamically pitched; imagine a car weaving in and out of traffic. It accelerates, then gradually slows down, eventually swerving out of the way of an oncoming semi-truck. Maybe you have a character wielding a magical sword; swinging it through the air at varying speeds and veracity while emitting a sparkly blue glow. These types of scenarios need a convincing sound that coincides with the every movement of the character or prop.
Digital Foley is often a straight-forward and technical element of the sound design we create for a TV show, and it can become a simple skill for an editor’s toolbox that amplifies each episode. Though footsteps are a small detail in the entirety of a sound edit, it is sometimes tedious and overwhelming to transition similar Foley edits between episodes. Listed below are a few quick alternative solutions that I use when editing Foley.
Today I’m going to be discussing a virtual instrument called Gravity by the folks at Heavyocity. It’s loaded into and powered by Kontakt Engine by Native Instruments. While Gravity itself doesn’t have a free version available, Kontakt is available as both a free version and full version. Gravity is an incredible, extensively customizable virtual instrument designed predominantly for use in modern scoring. It’s comprised of 4 instrumentation sections: Hits, Pads, Risers, and Stings. Each of these 4 main sections breaks down further into complex blends of the loaded-in beautiful, high quality samples within the category as well as the simplified individual samples for additional customization with the effects and other adjustable parameters.
In past blog posts, we have mentioned different ways to optimize Kontakt, or other samplers, to digitally walk foley for our shows and how advantageous it has been in animation. It often involved pulling walk cycles into Pro Tools and cutting up small samples then exporting the samples and pulling them into Kontakt. This method, although convenient, is not the only way to create footstep samples. In this blog post, I will do my best to give instructions on how to create samples without having to cut up the original audio file in Pro Tools; and instead splice or split the original audio file within Kontakt then mapping it to your desired keys, keeping the source file intact! Woohoo, get excited!
Are you interested in our sound design toolkits, but aren't sure what they are? Check out this great video demo, Getting Creative with Your Sound Design Toolkit!
Don't forget that from now until 12/25, the sound design toolkit is FREE with your purchase of the Heads Up Display SFX library! That's $20 off! Don't miss out.
