cognition shevino vimeo from SHU Film & Media Production on Vimeo.
Ok, 127 hours is an exaggeration, the real timeframe was around 44 hours spent in the edit suites.
With Christi's sound designer bailing the weekend before completion myself and Alex took on the duty of finishing this sci-fi thriller, which was no easy task given we had to build it from the ground up having spent little to no time in the pre-vis stage.
We split off to work on different segments, alex on dialogue, christi to carry on spotting arbitrary foley and the like, and me to work on music, tones and sound effects. As a first attempt at sound design christi did a commendable job, and was apt and placing his sourced tones for maximum dramatic effect.
I had said I would try to provide him with some music beforehand so I had some ideas in the works. The first uses the tremolo drone from that previously unused song, with some sculpture chimes that would become a motif surrounding the controller.
It accompanies the revelation about the chips controlling people in the basement scene, and the introduction of the bass adds an ominous touch of sci-fi horror.
The second song ended up being used when the conspiricist brains someone with his hammer in a corridor. I removed the synth lead melody and snare hits to make it sound like less of a song and more like a score.
The bass is very low and won't sound so strong unless played on capable speakers. The other bass part was made using a 'wob' bass I created on the ES2 after watching a tutorial online.
This setting crafts a typical dubstep style wobble sound that can be altered by adjusting the LFO rate.
It is also what I used for the TV static effect, dropping the LFO rate to 1 bar, and running it through bit crusher, altering the downsampling level manually to give it distortion.
I started exporting random tones and sounds that could be inserted anywhere into the film, and recycled some things from other projects in my library, with my old War of the Worlds sound design piece offering many reusable elements. A section of the reversed 'you dropped the soap' from HAFH is used as she begins to be stalked, but it is unnoticeable with the other musical layers introduced. Though a little cheesy I added the dramatic fuzzy bass to ease into the song that accompanies the chase scene, as it felt like an abrupt transition before to go from nothing to an industrial jungle track.
To accompany the incredible shot when the camera spins down the stairwell I created another Filter sweep on the ES2, assigning the cut off to a manuel knob and boosting the low end EQ to give a whooshing sensation.
Just after she meets the conspiricist the characters make their way to his basement lair. This was sonically empty and I attempted to create the impression of a drone ship hovering overhead. I combined the sound of a helicopter and an overhead plane and used EQ to boost the deeper frequencies. And added some digital static noise to evoke some sort of scanning mechanism. It's not as successful as I would have liked, although it does give the idea that there is something out there, and the characters do anxiously look up several times. Ideally I would have planned this use of ascousmatic space in pre-production, and had an overhead light or two in the shoot, hinting at the technology and larger world of the film.
The hammer blows were made from my previous experiments with fruit, and provide a suitable pulpiness. I also decided to orchestrate the archive footage with a diagetic projector sound, ending with a whooshing sound slowed down on the ESX24 sample editor.
The final sequence was very difficult to work out in the time frame given as it cut between a brilliantly performed dialogue with diagetic classical music, and a climatic attempt to 'bring down the system' that required a rapid build up in tension and stakes. Christi ended up using some sourced music which I layered some extra elements into as the piece strayed into some major melodies that weren't befitting of the tone. These extra elements were a mix of bowed guitar and a cello setting synth and blended reasonable well. I also mixed in a section of 'Squared' the arpeggiated song I had made for a game to accompany the conspirisist, as it had a thrillerish quality about it.
The piece is still rough and could do with fine tuning, with a more nuanced approached to tension ramping and where to let the piece breath, however our main priority was coverage, to ensure no scene felt too sparse or underdeveloped. Finishing it all was an achievement in the timeframe we had, but I would still like to improve on it at some point, and write my own score for the final scene.
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