How its made

I ended up doing all of the sound design in Logic and Soundtrack Pro, as this meant I could work from home, and I'd also had some issues with access privileges in Pro Tools. I had intended to draft the piece in STP and then re-edit a final mix in protools, however due to an oversight in exporting and some naivety on my part this would have more trouble than it was worth. When exporting edited clips I hadn't noticed that the submix was set to 5 channels for surround sound.

This wouldn't normally be a problem ,as in STP you can alter the channel so the clips will become mono or stereo, and each track can contain any sort of clip,

whereas Pro tools requires specific mono and stereo track designation from the outset. I had also foolishly hoped to be able to drag clips straight out of STP to Pro Tools, which was wishful thinking.

For the first act my directors notes were 'no woodland sounds!', 'low hum' and 'high contrasting tone. When trying to record atmos tracks I had found the overhead planes infuriating however in this instance I decided to enhance the sound by manually automating the lower frequencies of the EQ in Logic with the latch function, and applied some reverb as well, creating a whooshing motion that compliments the slow-mo of the footage shot at 50fps.

The higher tone was made by sustaining a note on the Sculpture Modeling synths' Wind Cyborg preset, and I again used Sculpture to create the faint flute motif using the aptly titled forest atmosphere preset. I originally didn't to use any sort of melodic score, relying instead on building an atmosphere tonally, however this fit nicely, and I also automated the volume and modulation as I played it so it did not impede too much, and it ended up blending well with the other tones to almost sound like forest ambience itself.

The final enhancement to act 1 was to accentuate the swinging of the characters thurible, which was done using a 'swoosh' sound effect, transposed in pitch and fed through a tremolo with a 1/16 rate with minimal smoothing and mixed in at 69%

All of these sounds build to a mild crescendo that peaks as the character blacks out the screen before the title appears.

The Kill List (2011) inspired title drum was made on the ESX24 by making the attack and sustain as short as possible to give it a percussive edge.

I wanted the second act to be naturalistic whilst building suspense through the ambience of the forrest itself. The only artificial element is the creaking tree sound effect, which I had tried to capture using a contact mic naturally, but failed to get a satisfactory result. The sound instead used was a creaking door, shifted down in pitch with EXS24 sampler. 

It works effectively to make the forest feel alive. My atmos tracks were a little lacking due to how sparse the trees had become. Though you could faintly hear owls and other birds in the distance I added in a few owl effects to enhance the off-screen presence. Though I didn't want the day time atmos to be too busy it was still a little lacking, so I added tracks of crickets and popping wheat to give it a greater texture, and chirping birds once the camera was closer to the trees.

I also added rustling leaves to suggest something is moving off-screen, and a sudden caw from a crow and the fluttering of wings to accompany a whip pan of the camera, adding a P.O.V element.

The fluttering was slightly extended and panned to follow the direction of the camera.

The ritual scene is preceded and introduced by the echoing beat of a drum that gets gradually louder, and continues to accent each cut until the climax. This is the section I was really able to go to town on, and I wanted to create as much sonic discomfort for the viewer as possible. To do this I wanted to create extreme dissonance without really using music, so I built frenetic layers of sound effects over a gradual drone. Many of the sound effects are percussion sound effects, reversed on Logic's Ultrabeat drum kits drag and drop samples function.

The xiaoluo sound in particular sounded very creepy reversed, and was used several times at different pitches with the EXS24. Another repeated sound is a recording I made hitting a wok with water in it and swilling it reversed. 

This compliments the steady drone of tibetan bells that become gradually more intense. I also included sound effects from the mise en scene, such as horrific pig squeals reversed, and the sound of a blade being drawn, which had the dry signal turned down completely and the wet reverb at 100% in space designer, also boosting the low frequency EQ the second time its played.

There is also a pitch shifted dry ice sound effect used to herald the characters approach. An idea i came up with early on was to include some sort of chant or whispers to accompany the ritual, and I wanted to homage Jocelyn Pook's 'backwards priests' composition from Eyes Wide Shut (1999) since our characters cultish attire is so similar to those on display there. The end result was something of an in-joke, I recited children's nursery rhyme 'this little piggy' in German which I found to be an amusing reference that no one would really understand when reversed.

Dieses kleine Schweinchen ging zum Markt,
  Und dieses kleine Schweinchen blieb zuhaus,
 Dieses kleine Schweinchen hatte Roast Beef,
Und dieses kleine Schweinchen hatte keins
 Und dieses kleine Schweinchen machte 'Wee wee wee' den ganzen Weg heim

This was also made to sound a little more demonic, as a nod to Evil Dead (1981), by pitch shifting it several semitones down, and extreme panning was applied to make it more disorientating.

What keeps the piece sustained and drives the crescendo home is the drone of the sculpture synth's ambient intrigue, which was double tracked with one note unchanging whilst the other gradually increases in pitch over an octave. I altered the bender range to twelve notes and manually automated it, making a few adjustments in the hyper editor to alter any mistakes.

This was in some part inspired by Hans Zimmer's theme for the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008).

This was also manually panned in 5.1 as I had originally wanted to do the piece in surround sound, with the build up of sounds coming from all directions, however as you can't monitor surround in STP I settled for a stereo mix for now.