Overcoming complex sound creation with the Sound Design Bundle

Hi Seb! Could you talk us through your this re-design?

Sure! if I’m being honest, I was going to give up on this design at one point!

What issues did you face when redesigning the sound for this scene?

The most difficult parts were the sheer level of destruction on the bridge, and the web shooter sounds.

There were so many details and materials in the scene – the bus dangling off the edge of the bridge, the bridge exploding – I couldn’t go out to a scrap yard, for example, to record these, so I wasn’t sure how I was going to pull this together.

How did the Krotos plugins help you overcome these issues?

The things that got me through it were the ready-to-use integrated libraries. The fact that the presets are already made when you purchase a library is an enormous time saver.

Krotos libraries gave a really nice palette of sounds to work with, covering metal, plastic, stone & wood – I’m really glad I invested in them. The workflow with Weaponiser was a great help too. The ability to adjust the timings of each engine all in one window made the process so straightforward

Web shooters are such an iconic sound effect at this point – what was your approach to redesigning these?

For the web shooters, I used a combination of water gun sound effects, a pneumatic pressure washer and a kind of ‘hit-marker’ style impact. without the impact sounds the sounds felt so airy and sounded like something was missing.

The other additional sounds to add were the creaks of the webs when he was swinging. These would have been really difficult to go out and record – unless I somehow find myself at a tug-of-war contest! But I managed to find some rope tension sounds from my library for this, which really enhanced the tension on the web ropes.

How did you use Reformer Pro in this sound re-design?

Reformer Pro was a great tool for this design. I used it for footsteps and for the clothing Foley, but interestingly, I also used it for the whooshes as he swings.

I felt like I really needed to accentuate the speed at which he is cutting through the air. So I went through my own Whoosh sound effects library and loaded these into Reformer Pro, then triggered them with the microphone. This really helped to capture the speed and momentum as it responded to my voice.

In comparison to footsteps, swinging from a web is a vastly different approach to portraying movement through sound. What considerations did you make for doing this?

With the webbing, every piece of web string is of a different length. Not only that, but each swing is a different length and a different speed.

What is your workflow for capturing audio in Weaponiser?

I route it out to a separate audio track – the nature of Weaponiser makes it randomise each time, so this makes sure I capture everything. Then as the project progresses, I choose the best results and build from there, adding processing etc.

With sound re-designs in general – do you feel like they are important to do?

Absolutely. I learned a lot from this project. I had done weapons and UI sound and those kinds of things before, and they are always a lot of fun. However, I had never automated big creaking metal sounds or anything like that so It was a good learning process.

When you are online and you see re-designs, you feel as if you are missing out or you need to catch up with your peers, but with my sound designs, I always want to be sure that what I put out is of top quality and I don’t want to rush it. I’d much rather take more time and get great results, and the Krotos stuff makes that approach much easier to do.

What’s the next project you will be working on?

I’m still working to develop a showreel, and these redesigns are a part of that, so I will be looking to do more. The next one is a more weapon-based Cyberpunk 2077 redesign using more Krotos Sound Effects libraries!