I recently submitted this project for my master's at Thinkspace, I thought it may be helpful for sound design folks to see the process and approach to the redesign above.
I hope it helps.......
Research & Media Prep
The Head-hunter
This low-budget film leans on sound design as a strong narrative device to fill a lot of the gaps budget couldn’t cover. Metallic screeches are used for suspense, wind ambiance builds tension before big events, and is heavy on elemental sounds.
Indoors, the bang of wooden doors, wooden knocks, and fires burning give an earthy feel to the scene.
Crows and nature are used to carry through a scene transition.
The Northman
Drones of horns, pedal tones, and ravens over frozen landscapes indicate a time and foreboding.
Inside ambiance contain mostly torches and fires.
Wind whistles between buildings and builds toward transitions. Deep Low male hum similar to Mongolian throat singing represents mythology and religion along with Female vocals in the distance.
God of War: Ragnarök
I watched a lot of the behind-the-scenes footage while playing and noticed very subtle fx throughout.
“Animals, we mainly played them at a distance to help play up the feeling of loneliness. You will also hear a lot of wood creaking, bare foliage and branches moving in the wind, and a constant barrage of cold wind howling throughout.”
Jorvik Centre
While away at a GAN meet-up, I visited the Jorvik centre. This was filled with elements and artifacts of Viking York, filled with sights and sounds of the time. While unrelated media in sound design I was inspired to learn more about the beliefs and religions of this time.
HellBlade: Seunas Sacrifice
In Senuas sacrifice, great storytelling is portrayed through the internal voices of Senua. The sound design is very earthy with wooden and metal sounds throughout.
The game takes advantage of the McGurk effect and uses the merging of thunder, breathing, and ambience to create tension
Jaws/Duel
While out of genre I wanted to try something, I’d heard before from Steven Spielberg, at the end of both movies a roar is inserted when both villains die at the end. I felt I could adopt something like this for the ending well scene to demonstrate the added value of audio.
Norse, Saxon & Celt Mythology
Outside of media, I read a lot about myths, legends, gods and symbolism.
Creative Approach
On the first watch of this clip, I noted there wasn’t really much going on within the scene in terms of Specifics however this gave me an opportunity to explore narrative sound design to convey a time in history, mythology, and story.
Note: In a real-world scenario I would have consulted and fact-checked the studio to understand the story however I was able to find that this clip is loosely based on the story of Wayland the Smith
To do this I used the research around myths and legends to understand the elements and beliefs around this time.
Animal Symbolism & Norse Mythology
I could probably write a thesis around this, but I truly wanted to understand what Celts/Saxon and Vikings believed.
This helped to understand the nature of their gods, and their relationship with the windand nature for example, In Norse mythology, the wind originates from the great eagle called Hraesvelg “Hræsvelgr” (corpse gulper) who sits at the northern end of heaven.
Wolves and crows also hold tremendous supernatural power in Saxon & Nordic beliefs this is seen in God of War Ragnarök but also particularly important in the underworld for foretelling an impending danger.
This research helped to understand how ambiance, wind, and nature could add to enforce the story and helped me form a sound pallet.
Sound Pallet
· Elemental (Wood, fire, wind, water)
· Battle/Metal
· Dark Magic
· Female voice
Narrative hit points & Composition.
Blacksmith
The blacksmith converses something paranormal, for this I kept character design to a minimal, footsteps, foley are heavy, present, and foreboding but there is no emotes or breathing.
Viking
In contrast, the Viking carries more detail, this is really enforced when the Norseman is on screen through emotes and heavy Armor.
Well
I wanted to make the well a character of its own, dark and a strong symbolism for hel. In the scene were the blacksmith claims the Vikings soul, he throws to the well sending to hell guarded by Garmr the dog. I added a large monster snarl to punctuate this as per Jaws/Duel.
Ring
The ring symbolizes love and a cycle, I felt this was the blacksmith’s last straw, a lost love, female whispers help to aid that narrative. I also added the whispering Nordic becoming the Viking when he lists his arms as if beckoning the attack, this was taken from Skaði - Viking Voice.
Ambience & Nature
Here I could use the elements to tell the story, Crows/nature help to carry transitions between scenes, the wind builds at key points and memories are echoed in the wind recalling the battle on the bridge and the boats of fallen brethren on the sea.
I also found this great twitter thread from Essa at Skywalker sound which helped the execute the approach.
Technical Approach
For the creation of sounds, I used a mixture of my own collection of samples, construction kits, samples and I recorded several samples using a Laviar and Tascam DR44wl
Construction kits include Boom Library Metal Titan, Medieval Melee, Just Sounds Warfare to name a few. All are royalty-free.
The Blacksmith
Footsteps & Foley
To create a sense of weight, spaced out all transients and ducked out before each step to increase weight. Each sample is set into mono and split into 3 frequency ranges.
Low – Footstep & surface material, this was pitched lower than normal. Enforcer was used to add extra wight to steps and a slight boost at 88hz to accentuate low frequency.
Mid to high
Top of footstep
Mid-level metal foley
Hightail – Jingle texture of metal for jewellery.
I reduced pitch here -7 semitones again to give more weight as the sample I had felt too high and used slight compression to bring out more detail.
The Viking
In contrast to the Blacksmith, I added more detail and recording my own voice to insert breathing and emotes. Again, I top & tailed each sample helping to create sample and not clutter the mix.
· Low Footstep, Armor Heavy movement
· Mid – Foot slide
· Mid – high Armor Mid Texture
· High Armor Light Texture
Spatial Awareness
I applied a spatial mix by splitting the screen and assigning 20,40,50,60 across the screen.
As each character element is mono, I was able to group all sound elements per character and set automation based on this model.
Ambience
Ambience relies heavily on reverbs & delays to put the actors in a space although there are a couple ambience beds. Creating separate FX tracks allowed me to automate sends when required in separate environments.
Delay –for memory recall and space, there is a slight high pass filter to ensure there isn’t a build-up of low mud and keeps things airy.
Convolution reverb of a small factory to recreate well ambience, an old billiard room for the wooden house and Koli national park for outside.
For Ambience beds split these into three areas, general ambience (wind), distance ambience and specifics. (Animals and spots) splitting like this allowed movement between ambient zones.
With all ambiences grouped this enabled control to build tension and allowed me to duck all ambience tracks at key points to create space for big transients.
Mix hierarchy.
As mentioned all individual tracks were fed into mix groups, giving flexibility for each element to cross different environments via FX sends.
All group tracks are EQ’d to allow space, for each other group track. This was particularly useful for clearing noise out of the ambience track allowing the rest of the tracks to breathe.
Difficulties
As per Sergio’s feedback, my first draft had too many musical elements, this was especially apparent at the latter half of the clip as I used a female singing voice to punctuate the supernatural against the repeated hit of the blacksmiths hammer.
To reduce this, I decided to swap a female signing voice to whispers and one single hammer hit. I preferred this approach in the end.
Mastering and using Youlean
On my formative, Matthew Belser commented on my mix and master (See tutor comments), something I’ve consciously tried to improve on for my summative.
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