The Giant Steps

Yesterday I wrote about composing by colors. Well there's another aspect of that same project that I'm working on, the sound design. There's going to be a TV commercial about the event and it needs some new sound elements the first of which was needed before the actual commercial is even ready. Since the project spans different medias (TV, radio and the internet) it requires a quite large array of different sound pieces.

One of them being an audio signature identifying the artists performing in the event. All the elements sound have the same feel to them so I started building a few blocks to form the basis for that sound world.

One of those blocks I started with is the foot steps of a giant walking in a city. I started by selecting the lowest and most massive bass drum sound I could find to form the thud caused by really heavy feet.

For the second layer of the sound I wanted a realistic sound of something heavy hitting the ground. At first I was thinking of concrete blocks, but then turned to falling trees, which had a more organic sound. I doubled that layer and shifted the pitch down an octave to get it to sound heavier and a little unnatural.

The third layer of the sound consisted of pitch shifted snapping branches and breaking wood. They give a nice organic breaking sound. Another layer had large falling rocks to designate the small pieces of pavement that might burst around the foot step.

As final touch I added a layer of shifting sand to make it sound like the pavement actually moves to the side when the foot presses down on it. After this I made several different version of the sound with varying volume levels for each layer to make them sound a little different and to make them work at different distances from the actual foot step in the commercial. Some of them are just low thuds and some of them have all the elements blaring at you at very close range.

This sound became the start of the audio signature. The rest of the audio signature consists of the green and orange musical sound scape I talked about in my previous Production Diary entry.