WRITTEN BY Natalia Saavedra
Sound Editor, BOOM BOX POST
Sound design for creature vocals and movement 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.
Understanding the character
The process of creature vocal sound design starts with understanding the character and its characteristics. What does the creature look like? What is its personality? What are its motivations? These questions help to inform the sound design and create a unique vocal signature for the character. Of course it helps to have some direction. Let’s attempt something unusual and go for a “wet robotic” sound, with Kraken-style monster vocals. A big monster with lots of tentacles. By this description alone we have several keywords that can help create the sound of this creature and what direction to take.
You’ll want to look for key moments where the monster will be making sounds. Usually, this includes breathing, growls, roars, pain screams and death screams. Additionally, I like to take note of the emotions that this creature is going through, since the vocal design is going to be the way to convey those emotions and bring this character to life. Besides all of this, we also have to convey the size of this creature, and for that we would need to create sound for body movements, tentacles, and in this case footsteps.
Experimenting with vocalization
Once the characteristics of the creature have been established, we can begin to experiment with different vocalizations. This can involve layering different animal sounds, manipulating human vocals, or even using synthetic sounds to create unique and otherworldly vocalizations. Check out this Boom Box Post Blog for tips on how to approach creature vocalization.
CREATING REALISM
One of the key elements of creature vocal sound design is creating a sense of realism. Even though the creatures themselves may be fictional, the vocalizations must be believable and grounded in reality. This involves understanding the anatomy of animals and how they produce sound, as well as studying the vocalizations of real animals to create a sense of authenticity. Since our prompt is to sound “organic and wet” in a way, I’d use animal sounds, specifically more reptile, dragon-like vocal sounds. I’d also use birds that sound prehistoric to give the impression that this creature is extremely old. For example, for the breathing I’d use four different sounds that gave specific characteristics: a heron sound that I pitched down to make it sound bigger, a snake hiss to give a more dangerous element to the breathing, a dragon vocal for a guttural and wet sound, and a slime type bubble that I’d pitch down to give an aquatic feel.
All together, they sound like a large other-worldly creature.
Emotion and Personality
Another important aspect of creature vocal sound design is creating a sense of emotion and personality. Just like human voices, creature vocalizations can convey a wide range of emotions, from fear and anger to joy and excitement. By creating unique vocalizations that reflect the character's personality, we can help to bring the creature to life and create a more immersive experience for the audience. In these three examples I’ll show you how I was able to create the feeling of being curious, being angry and aggressive (roars), and being in pain.
Consider if the monster doesn’t know what’s happening once it encounters our heroes, so it is trying to decipher what they are. To express this feeling I would want it to feel more light and contemplative to give it a bit more of vulnerability, compared to when it is angry or in pain where it needs to sound big and threatening. For a sense of curiosity, I would use some underwater whooshes that were reverberated, and vocals from an elephant that were reverberated as well. And to keep the robotic effect, I would use a very high pitch servo sound with sorts of vocalizations, pitched down to match the creature’s size.
For roars that are the most expressive moment of a monster in terms of attack, I’d look for sounds that were a bit more hissy, and layered them together with roars of very large monsters like a Godzilla type scream. I’d also add a distant elephant scream that’s reverberated, making it sound mythical and keeping it consistent with the previous sounds so it can sound like the same monster.
To show pain, I’d search for animal vocalizations that had a big attack and long decay so we could hear the monster not only screaming, but also releasing a lot of air. For this I found sound from elephants, dragons, and mythical creatures that I time compressed for that bigger attack. For the longer screams which we usually refer to a death screams, I’d want to stay consistent with the sounds we established for the creature, but since they had to be longer and more dramatic, I decided to time stretch and pitch down the roar sound that we already created a bit to create a longer decay and diminished attack—that way, the monster sounds weak and defeated.
Here’s a snippet of the vocals evolving.
Body Characteristics
Another aspect we need to consider when making creature sound design is creating their body characteristics to reflect where the creature comes from. Imagine this creature is a massive high tech robot that moves very smoothly, living where it’s wet and slimy. I first created a slimy bed that felt metallic and robotic, and to achieve this I used a flanger plugin and created that sense of artificial sound. I’d layer this together with two different sounds: a texture synthy sound that created movement, and servos that were reversed and processed to make them seem wet. Together, they create a sensation of alien yet still distinctly mechanical movement.
Lastly, let’s consider designing footsteps that give the monster some size. I’d use heavy metal robot footsteps with dry mechanical gears for the movement of each leg, and LFE sweetener on each footstep so it can cut through the mix and create the weight this creature needs
Final Project
And all of this together creates the whole sound build up for a creature that involves all aspects of it. Here’s a sound example of how everything would come together:
By understanding the characteristics of a creature and experimenting with different sounds, we can create a sense of scale and emotion and really bring a monster to life.
If you enjoyed this blog, check out these:
A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO STARTING YOUR SOUND EFFECTS LIBRARY
DESIGNING A NON-TRADITIONAL MOTOR