A COLLABORATIVE POST WITH INTRODUCTION By JACOB COOK
ASSISTANT EDITOR, BOOM BOX POST
Welcome back to our new series of monthly blog posts called Focus on the Creative! These casual interviews focus on the topic of creativity and design in our daily work. This month I talked with award-winning sound effects and foley editor Tess Fournier to chat about her design for a retro-inspired sci-fi machine.
Tell us about the sound you created and the character it represents
So I created a telemetry steady for this old school 80’s inspired sci-fi machine, it kind of looks like a big gameboy with lots of flashing lights and needed some cool sound, so I created a telemetry steady to represent it. There’s a theme with this character, the inventions are brand new but they look old and boxy.
What was your process for creating the sound?
I wanted to make something new from scratch because I don’t often get to do that on this show. Anytime there’s these sci-fi-esque machines I try to make things from scratch. I used Sunrizer (mentioned in our Top 5 iPad Apps for Sound Designers Blog Post) and I messed with a lot of the presets, it’s really easy to use.
I played around until I found a sound that I liked and then performed sort of nonsense into Pro Tools that I could layer up. I exported those recordings, tweaked the pitch, and layered them all up. I also ran a few of the layers into Waves Sci-fi to warp it a little more and get some robotic sound into it. The result is a very basic telemetry sound that is kinda old -school, which a lot of cartoons like. I think it could be used for a lot of different stuff! I would definitely suggest taking a look at using apps for sound design, there’s are so many to explore.
