Sound Design and Concept
I first noticed the Sound Design challenge hosted on designingsound.org back in October when the site hosted it's twelfth sound design challenge, the Lifeless Howl. I remember looking through some of the entries that were up at the time and considered entering but at the time was preoccupied with class work and decided to put it off until the next challenge. I really enjoyed the creativity behind the challenge and how it really seemed to open the mind up to the possibilities of sound design by limiting the designer to creating a monsters howl with anything except sounds created by organisms. I immediately regretted not entering when the top five entries were posted for voting and I heard how awesome they all sounded! I was jealous that I had missed out on a great opportunity to stretch my sound design mind!
The thirteenth challenge, Creepy Advertising, is an entirely different beast than the previous challenge though. Being tasked with the creation of an entire experience rather than just one creature sound, it presented a larger challenge before even considering the context of the challenge. The Creepy Advertising challenge was to a task in which you took a video from an old 50's horror movie night ad and replaced all the audio yourself including the voiceover. The challenge here was that you couldn't use any music and you had to make it sound like it really came from the 50's but you still had to achieve the aspect of horror and advertisement.
Concept
My first step in taking on this challenge was to place myself into the shoes of a sound designer from the 50's. Now the thing about the 50's was that there really wasn't much "design" to even really going on in the sound departments, well not in the way we see it today. People were sitting at computers manipulating sound with Pro Tools and Logic and hosts of plug ins. Sound Design in the 50's was more sound construction. A lot of famous sound designers created devices to make the sounds they wanted rather than morphing and changing the sound of something to be what they wanted.
Example of Old Disney Sound Design! The whole video is awesome and I recommend watching it but you can skip to around 3:20ish for what I'm referencing.
So I drew my inspiration for this video from these old sound design pioneers. I wanted my video to contain prop created sounds. Though these kind of prop sounds don't always portray the horror aspect well and sometimes can come off as silly, I thought the risk in mood would pay off by the achievement of authenticity.
Creation
I didn't want the video to become to convoluted with sounds so as to stick with the old feel. To accomplish this I narrowed down my sound effects based just on what was important in the video stills. Each of these sounds were ultimately achieved with only my own voice and sounds from classic prop items. For the Eye ball pops I used a mouth harp to create that classic "boing" just like Disney did and a bottle cork pop to make that cartoony "pop" noise. For the eruption before the final "Doomsday" announcement I used one of my cooking sheets for the old "metal sheet thunder" trick and was very pleased with the results. For the needle stab and wing flapping I used my own mouth. All these raw prop uses came together to create a very pleasing old feel to the advertisement.
The hardest part of this challenge was creating that sonic 50's sound for the entire video. I've always focused on trying to make all of my projects sound better in sound quality so it was an interesting challenge to try and work backwards. I found a free plugin by Izotope that worked really well in creating that vinyl noise and pop sound that you would e=hear in something from this era. For the voiceover, I ran it through a very slight distortion plugin to try to recreate a slight tube compression on the voice and boosted the low end a little more than usual and cut out the very high end. One thing I discovered was that when I first started to create my 50's sound, I was going way overboard and everything sound like it was coming from a late 1800th century phonograph tube or something. Sound has improved drastically since the 50's but in the grand scheme of things it really didn't feel like much of an improvement when I looked at the larger picture. I found that I didn't have to do nearly as much to the sound quality as I had planned to achieve the sound I wanted.
The Final Product
What Was Learned
This challenge gave me an interesting perspective on sound design and also allowed me to dip my toes in its roots. I discovered that our technology and machinery, although totally awesome, can sometimes become all we focus on. By grabbing this project by the horns, and trying to lead it into a real authentic feel, I found that simplicity can lead to creativity and inspiration. When you strip away the layers of possibilities and force yourself into a box with limited tools, it causes your mind to view these things in a new way and it causes you to utilize sound as a story telling device more effectively. When we can't just throw our fancy plugins and sound libraries at everything, we have to pick the perfect sounds and balance the project just right to achieve our goals! In the future I would love to challenge myself more to create effective sound use with limited resources to expand my abilities.
Thanks for reading!
-Matthew Hagberg
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