Check out the experimental (and slightly gory) short below, with sound design by Kevin Senzaki and Mai Ikushima. We're also excited to be able to bring you the story behind the sound design, told by Kevin Senzaki himself:
The story behind the lightsaber sound – by Kevin Senzaki:
I was approached by Niko Pueringer at Corridor Digital about doing sound design for the short, and we discussed the general concept — lightsabers, but different — and that the visual effects would be flame-based instead of Star Wars-like “laser energy.” Corridor and I are frequent collaborators, so our shorthand is pretty much “this is the idea; go do something,” and that’s about it!
I previously did the sound for the Star Wars fan film SC 38 Reimagined, so I made a personal rule that I couldn’t use anything I used for lightsabers in that piece — so that meant no dry ice squeals or electricity sounds, among other things!
It’s basically impossible to imagine a lightsaber without its iconic sounds, so my brainstorming was done without looking at the picture, to try to get away from that imagination bias. Since these swords were like focused jet engines or torches, I thought using flame whooshes and explosive impacts would be a good place to start, both credible to the picture and different enough from Star Wars. I previously did the sound for the Star Wars fan film SC 38 Reimagined, so I made a personal rule that I couldn’t use anything I used for lightsabers in that piece — so that meant no dry ice squeals or electricity sounds, among other things!
The sound for the opening calibration shot was made from flame elements and pneumatic air hisses, but what I think holds it together are a couple subtle tonal ringing sounds, one of which is from a recording I made of an electric toothbrush resonating cello strings, and a meditation singing bowl.
What I think holds it together are a couple subtle tonal ringing sounds, one of which is from a recording I made of an electric toothbrush resonating cello strings, and a meditation singing bowl
The swords’ idling sounds are mostly steady flame elements like bunsen burners, flamethrowers, and rockets, with some layers featuring rapid ducking from Waves OneKnob Pumper and Decapitator to get a bit more texture and bite. Steady flame sounds are pretty washy and flat on their own!
The sword swings were based around pitched-up fire whooshes, but I took a results-based “whatever works” approach towards adding additional layers to make things work in-the-moment. There’s additional layers of sci-fi spaceship bys, synthesized low end sweeteners, and lion roars to give the weapon swings a sense of danger and changing proximity to the viewer.
Both Niko and I were really interested in having the acoustics of the warehouse space as a major sonic character, so I relied heavily on The London Warehouse Firearms Library – Indoor Guns as my basic building block for the sword hits, to really have something to put them in that large room. I then added some high-end and low-end impact sweeteners, more fire elements, and then ran everything through a convolution reverb to really glue everything to the space on-screen.
The sound design was a pretty straightforward process of conceiving an idea and then building it in layers to express that as an end result — which was good, since we had a tight turnaround of about a week, so there wasn’t much room for changing direction midway through! Despite that limitation, I did have fun sneaking in a couple specific elements – including a 909 kick drum, a sound that really made an impression on me as part of the blaster pistol in Blade Runner 2049.
(via David Filskov)
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