Category: Sound Design

X-Men Destiny Sound Design by Nick Peck

Sound Designer Nick Peck has been making extensive use of his new Kyma system for the upcoming Activision/Marvel video game X-Men Destiny. “I hadn’t used Kyma in nearly 20 years, and was just blown away by how far it had come since the early days,” said Peck.  He went on to describe how he incorporated Kyma into his workflow on the game:

I was a bit intimidated of working it into my system, since I was knee deep in production. So I started slowly, going through Kyma X Revealed for a few minutes each day. As it turns out, you don’t really have to make complex patches in order to harness Kyma’s amazing processing power. I’ve created foley libraries, morphed dialog, and done tons of real-time sample manipulation by making sounds that only use one or two modules. The key for me is the excellent Kyma Control iPad software. The expressive gestural power of the iPad combined with Kyma fits my approach to sound design like a glove – I can explore to my heart’s content, and when I get a sound dialed in, I just re-record it into Pro Tools against the picture.

 

Liquid Engineering

Joseph Fraioli of JAFBOX SOUND has posted a new project on his sound design reel featuring a character called lee that was created entirely in Kyma.  lee is an amorphous formation of oil speeding through its paces on a futuristic test track in a new advertising campaign directed by psyop.

http://www.jafboxsound.com/works/view/502

To create the voice of lee, Fraioli created kits of vehicle sounds, including bys, accelerations, idles etc and performed them using his Wacom tablet.  He recorded all of his performances, selected the best ones, and then edited and layered the results in Pro Tools.

Leaving us with the question: why does lee bother to stop at the traffic light?

Burtt & Wood talk about Super 8

Sound designer, Ben Burtt. Photo by Gregory Schwartz (www.editorsguild.com)

There’s a fascinating piece by Mel Lambert on the Editor’s Guild web site, giving details of every aspect of the sound—from dialog to Foley, to mixing, to creative sound design— for JJ Abrams new science fiction film, Super 8.

In it, master sound designer, Ben Burtt details how he used his own voice to control a bank of sounds in Kyma, performing it like a musical instrument to create the voice of the alien.  Burtt says that he wanted to create a character who, although alien, had an expressive soul, purpose, and rationality.  Once Industrial Light & Magic, which handled visual special effects, heard Burtt’s vocalizations, they were so inspired that they added a tongue to the creature’s mouth! One of the few times that they created picture to sound, instead of the other way around.

Full of insider tips and tricks ranging from how Burtt sustained the tension in a long train crash scene to how Matthew Wood compensated for young actors’ voices changing over the course of the shoot, the piece is essential reading for anyone who’s serious about sound design!

(Thanks to Matteo Milani for spotting this article and sharing it with us!)

Supervising Sound Editor, Matthew Wood (www.editorsguild.com)

FM Slide-whistle

Jean-Edouard Miclot’s “Field and Toys 2010” is an entertaining and enlightening video starring the sound designer in a variety of intriguing, and often amusing, sound-recording scenes. At around 4.40 you can see Jean-Edouard controlling Kyma with the audio output of a slide whistle and a Wacom Tablet.

Field and Toys 2010 is an entertaining and enlightening video starring sound designer Jean-Edouard Miclot in a variety of intriguing, and often amusing, sound-recording scenes.  With sound sources ranging from wolves to whoopee cushions, from commuter trains to exploding condoms and shaky springs to seaplanes (not to mention several mysterious sound-producing toys), this video is chock full of ideas for sound design sources.  And at around 4.40 you can see Jean-Edouard taking it a step further by controlling a Kyma frequency modulation Sound with the audio output of a slide whistle and a Wacom Tablet.

Cataclysmic

Sound designer Mike Johnson made extensive use of Kyma in his sound design work for Blizzard Entertainment’s latest World of WarCraft expansion, Cataclysm, to create hybrid vocalizations for several of the new creatures that now populate the world of Azeroth.

Sound designer, Mike Johnson made extensive use of Kyma in the sounds for Blizzard Entertainment‘s latest World of  WarCraft expansion,  Cataclysm.

Johnson used Kyma to create hybrid vocalizations for several of the new creatures that now populate the world of Azeroth.  Creatures with names such asRock Demon, Fire Dragon, Slime Creature, Rock Worm, Stone Golem and Wood Creature were created by taking various human and animal vocalizations and warping them with fire, rock, and other elemental forces to visceral, terrifyingly effect. According to Johnson, “I couldn’t have done it without my Kyma system.”

The Acceptance

Kyma played such a strong role in the sound design for Yogesh Kubchandani’s directorial debut, The Acceptance, he gave it an ending credit. Can you solve the mysteries in this compelling, poetic film? http://www.3stonespictures.com

Following the initial screening of The Acceptance in New York City, director Yogesh Khubchandani, was barraged by questions when he took the stage. He politely declined to speak about the film, suggesting only that if people still had questions, they should watch the film again, adding “there are no symbols in the film; I just had one impression that could not be expressed in words, and so the film came out.” Can you solve its mysteries? (Order your own DVD copy of the film at http://www.3stonespictures.com)

Certain unforeseen events can almost literally befall us, unexpectedly and violently tearing into the web of our interconnections and relationships. In Yogesh Khubchandani’s new film, The Acceptance, one such event has disrupted the existence of Elli (compellingly played by Alicia Lobo) to its very core. Khubchandani’s poetic, spell-binding film uses images and sounds to create an urgent sense of mystery as he traces her inner journey from near despair to a calm acceptance. Khubchandani masterfully recreates a seamless interleaving of the inner imagination and outer events that constitute Elli’s flow of experience. Intense emotion is experienced as sudden silence and a sense of time slowing almost to stop as the character focuses full attention on the anger or fear or frustration and the rest of the world disappears for that stretched-out moment of time. Several threads weave themselves throughout the film: the restorative power of nature, thanking God for what we do NOT have, vegetarianism as identity, the relationships between mothers and daughters (the male characters rarely appear on screen).

Khubchandani also did the sound design for the film, using the sounds of birds, wind and water contrasted with the rattling drones of machines to underscore his themes. Like the images, the sound slips easily back and forth between realism and the logic of dreams. Kyma played such a large role in this transformation, it even gets a credit at the end of the film!

Disintegrating Podracers

The Sounds of Star Wars (http://www.chroniclebooks.com/soundsofstarwars/), a new book by JW Rinzler and Ben Burtt, describes how Kyma was used to create some of the iconic sounds in the Star Wars prequels.

The Sounds of Star Wars, co-authored by JW Rinzler and Ben Burtt, is no ordinary text; this book comes with its own built-in sound-playback system and headphone jack, so when you read about a sound, you can also hear it at the press of a button.

Not only does the book cover the classic Star Wars sounds, it also describes how Ben Burtt and Matt Wood used Kyma both to update some of those sounds as well as create new sounds for the prequels.  You can read (and hear), for example, how they used Kyma to generate Wat Tambor’s dialog or to do frequency following on Doppler shifts for podracer fly-bys (and the Kyma Chopper to create the sound of pieces flying off the podracers).

For more information and excerpts visit http://www.chroniclebooks.com/soundsofstarwars/