Horizon: Forbidden West Sound Design – Redesigning Cloth Foley With Reformer Pro

Joshua Gouzy is a Sound Designer, Composer & New Orleans Jazz Bassist with a passion for games. In this three-part feature, Joshua shares how he redesigned this scene from Horizon: Forbidden West using Reformer Pro, Weaponiser & Dehumaniser 2.

Joshua Gouzy:

A crucial skill for any sound designer is to be capable of delivering top-quality assets quickly and efficiently. While I am confident in my abilities as a designer to bring me to the necessary end result, the Krotos plugins have essentially turbocharged my workflow speed of getting to those points.

As exciting and rewarding as it is to discover and create synthesis and/or samples
and shape them to the needs of a project, there are certain aspects of sound designing that can get repetitive and tedious. The Krotos plugins I use cut down on those times tremendously, leaving me with more room for sonic exploration and creativity, which naturally results in better quality assets, and an overall happier client.

When starting a new project, it’s never a question of whether or not I would use a Krotos plugin, but rather how many I’ll use. When planning my approach for rescoring the sound design for a battle sequence in the new video game Horizon: Forbidden West, I knew from the very start that I would be using the Krotos plugins Reformer Pro, Weaponiser, and Dehumaniser 2.

“When making Aloy’s cloth sounds, I decided to use Reformer Pro for sake of efficiency and ease of use, rather than layering in premade sounds from a foley library or recording my own sounds.

What’s remarkable about Reformer Pro is the ability to quickly layer multiple samples that react to your microphone input, blending and morphing with each other in real-time to create brand new and unique sounds entirely.

Essentially, your voice gets processed into actual sound effects. Incredible and fun!”.

“After trying out the many options included in Clothes & Materials Foley Sound Effects Library Vol. 1, I decided to go with a canvas and backpack blend as Aloy’s main cloth sound, and I later layered in some leather bag sounds for added detail.

With my microphone set to record, I literally hummed at various volumes into the mic to create the sounds of Aloy’s cloth sounds as they happened on screen in real-time.”

“Whenever Aloy would dive and roll, or shoot a weapon, or any other action that required a more exaggerated cloth sound, I would simply hum louder to create a larger transient, and Reformer Pro reacted quickly to my vocal input to deliver the necessary larger sounds.

After the recordings were finished, I committed the tracks and labelled them, put a gentle high-pass using Fab Filter’s Pro-Q 3, disabled the Reformer Pro instance (to save computer resources), and was good to go. Quick, simple, and really fun.

Reformer Pro is absolutely my go-to for Foley, and it’s also phenomenal for many other types of SFX. Below is a YouTube link to a version of the rescore with the Tremortusk muted, to better hear the subtleties of Aloy’s movement sounds.”

Keep in mind the volume ducking and automation used to make room for other sounds from the Tremortusk:

Additional spots where Reformer Pro was used:

● Water effects

● Sand impacts and slides

● Tremortusk ambient body noises

● The purple plasma blasts that zip through the sand toward Aloy

Next Week, Joshua takes us through the design process for the Tremortusk Cannons using Weaponiser – For more on Joshua and his work:

Visit his website: https://www.joshuagouzy.com/