Thank you for participating, we have been overwhelmed by the amount of sound designs sent in, as well as by the different approaches you all took! I thought it would be great to not only have the clips judged by an audio person (me), but also by a filmmaking crew that hires audio people in all kind of positions on a weekly basis. I asked my colleagues of OH MY! to be part of the jury. We all had different favourites, but with a sophisticated rating system we decided on the following winners:
Third place, winning two libraries from the Sound of Essen releases of his choice, is Nils Vogel-Bartling.
He created a different background that plays well with the gritty unique robot voice he chose. He also gave a voice to the human and continues his story off-screen.
Second place, again winning two libraries from the Sound of Essen releases of his choice, is Arya Afshar.
The atmo & the voice both transported the impression of a puzzled robot, who in the end was very unhappy with his fate of being taken away.
The first place and winner of all Sound of Essen present and future libraries ( with the biggest to date coming up in a few weeks) is Benjamin Gale!
His story is very on point. The sounds were processed to match the thrilling atmo he chose for the beginning of the clip. The noise builds up to the very moment the robot is finally assembled. Then, all the tension is released in a cute voice, that matched the visuals very well. Also the relation between the single sounds of the robot was greatly represented, by the impact of the robot body playing nicely in the stereo field.
Watching that many videos, it hasn’t been easy to judge fairly. We want to let you in on our thought process. First we randomized all links, so we weren’t looking at names. Then we went ahead and watched all the videos once, narrowing it down to 50 and then deciding on a top-20, before we finally picked the winners. One quality that made your design stand out was whether you aimed for extraordinary sound effects. Did you alter / edit / change the given samples in a certain way that no-one else did? Also we were looking for storytelling. Did you create an aural world in the black / logo at the beginning of the clip and in the end. Did you tell a scene in the overhead sequence, where “nothing happened” on-screen, and we only see robot parts. Also did you tell other off-screen action? Like has the giant human any sound, what happens to the robot…?
Than of course we were listening to the voice design of the robot. Did you manage to give him certain emotions? And was the sound consistent over the whole 33 seconds, without being too repetitive? And finally we also found it very important to find a dramatic composition. Some entries had great technical sound design for the single movements, but a lack of tension. In many stories this hole is often filled by music, but we were especially searching for a winner to be able to do this with sounds only.
With many of your clips shining on some or one point(s) of the above, it was really hard to decide!
Congratulations to the winners once again, and thanks to every single one of you who entered the sound design contest. I will send out a little sound pack with some robot-related sounds to all of you who contributed.
Best wishes from Nils
