A COLLABORATIVE POST WITH INTRODUCTION BY JACOB COOK
ASSISTANT EDITOR, BOOM BOX POST
In this month's Inside Sound Design, we have a brief chat with sound effects editor Kevin Hart. Kevin is a passionate member of the Boom Box Team who experiments with integrating other DAW's and softwares into his workflow. You can read about his method for creating dynamic fight backgrounds in Ableton Live here. In this post, Kevin shares his ideas and methods for creating the sound of high powered, electricity-based energy skates.
Hey Kevin! What is the exciting sound effects build you are showing us today?
I had a new super villain appear in my show recently and I wanted to create a whole bunch of new signature sounds for it. Using electricity and power surges this character moves around at lightning fast speeds. Its kind of like roller blading or ice-skating on lightning. I wanted to create something original for the characters movement that had a lot of electrical energy and motion.
Can you break down the build and process for us?
I started with a good electrical steady sound and also added a high frequency static layer. I ran these through Grain Delay in Ableton Live and using it as an automation filter I adjusted the pitch and frequency around to make the steady move around over time.
I then added a mid-range synth drone steady that had a Tron like sound. With all these layered up I ran them through the Waves Doppler plug-in to create a variety of long and short pass-bys. The Tron-like synth layer really helped sell the doppler and gave it an awesome energy like sound. Lastly I found some cool real world ice-skateing bys and layered those in last in correlation with the doppler build.
What kind of films and shows inspire and inform this kind of sound design in your work?
I definitely went for a Tron like sound to start. In the movie, all the design of the bike pass-bys have a great energy sound to them, and they sound great as dopplers. I also like the sound of Electro in The Amazing Spider Man 2. His design seemed heavily electrically and static based. Merging these two concepts together created a really awesome and original sound base for my new super villain design.