Efficient Workflows, Sound Banks and Sound Design

The main purpose of a sound bank for me is the ease and convenience of finding certain sounds that I find may be suitable for certain purposes, the ability to be efficient when working becomes more and more prevalent to me the more I work as I find annoyance in spending too much time figuring things out when I could be spending it creatively. The ability to be creative and have an efficient workflow I think go hand in hand in being the most productive and effective. This was solely the reason I decided to get a dedicated sound bank that allows me to find sounds from the cloud and local in a fast efficient manner. Soundly enables me to search for ideas and sounds from a database online and also allows me to search my local drives for sounds I may want to use. When working with sound design I believe the workspace browser has its annoyances, as for seemingly resetting itself and me having to go back into the appropriate file index each time I want to find a certain sound. My home setup allows me to watch the video and find sounds I want on one monitor whilst operating Pro Tools on the other which I think is a pretty efficient method.

One negative I guess I could mention would be the option paralysis which is something I guess still factors into my inefficiency to find sounds I want, but I guess more options may be better than less in this instance.

Gathering feedback off of people I have learned that certain sounds may not be suitable for certain scenes, for instance.. one issue I have faced is getting the fish scene right, that I believe is starting to take shape. I have had to layer a lot of sounds to get the sound I wanted as it suffered from sounding unrealistic and 'cartoonish'. I was able to find suitable sounds that I was able to layer and use automation and level control to allow me to get the control of the volume right depending on the camera perspective. This use of perspective control can also be seen in the house as the character looks towards the gramophone, just one of the many tropes of horror I have been trying to involve into my rendition of this game trailer.

Sound Design

I have been experimenting more with the sound design now that I am happy with the sound elements that are in place, and one scene I have been trying to implement more sound design is the scene when the water crashes and he is swimming for his life. I decided to use Serum to design a low rising tone, that involves two oscillators with distinct sounds operating with modulation through the use of LFO envelope automation.

https://vimeo.com/329417593

The video above shows serum at work.