VFS Final Project - Anomaly 2

This was my final audio project at VFS, and utilizes all of the audio skills I learned in this past year. The audio is a complete re-design with the majority of original audio added to the sound edits. The music provided by 5 Alarm.

VO:

I recorded the voice over and the majority of the sounds for the final trailer. I used McDSP's Futzbox plugin to get the radio effect for the introduction and scavenger voices; I made a wet/dry mix with a low-passed signal of the recorded audio as the dry. For the commanders helmet reverb, I took an impulse recording of a ripped piece of air duct from the factory and used it as the dry signal with a different futz as a wet. Overall, the process was very challenging. The human voice contains many nuances on top of adding in processing from both reverbs and radio futzs. I had a lot of EQing to do in order to balance the quality of the voice with the effect I wanted in the end.

SFX:

Many of the mechanical sounds for the B-E-A-R tank were recorded in a real metal factory with a few library sounds to accent the current design. The evil dinosaur bots were designed from the squeaks of various doors opening and closing at the film school combined with bowing an old metal oil drum. The intro was especially fun to work on; I took a lot of recorded announcer dialogue from previous VFS school projects (with permission of course) and futz them in combination with sonar pings and radio tuning, distortion, and static. It made for a great opening soundscape to establish the context of the rest of the action later on. Many of the snow sliding sounds were taken from a skiing trip at Cypress mountain in northern Vancouver. The laser and gun design was all done with Komplete Synths: Massive and Reaktor 5.

The most challenging thing for me personally was perspective. With POV (point of view) changes, I had to take into account how much "air" or distance was between the camera and the point source of the sound. I took this into account when recording a lot of the mechanical sounds and ended up making three batches of recordings: close, medium, and far distances. This gave me more leeway when I added my edits.

I hope you enjoy the final redesign of this Anomaly 2 animated intro!

~MJ

Wrath of the Lich King Opening Cinematic

This is my take on the opening cinematic for World of Warcraft’s second expansion: Wrath of the Lich King. My favorite part of this was editing and mixing the voice over; a realm that is very new to me. I got my partner to record his deep voice for the part of Terenas Menethil II, Arthas’ father, whom you hear speaking in the opening. I dropped his voice by one semitone and added 2:1 compression, followed by reverb using the Altiverb plug-in. I used two separate 7 band EQ’s, one for color and one for ducking out frequencies that were consistently boomy or shrill to the ear. The human voice has a ton of nuance that is taken for granted due to the nature of our ears ability to naturally compress and EQ what we hear before the brain processes it. A microphone does not have that luxury and as a result, we get a very “raw” like quality to the voice that will sound extremely cacophonous at times. That’s why we have our guardian angels: the dialogue mixers.

Check this out! This was a fun one to make, and I learned a great deal along the way.

~MJ