Lava Mine - Sound Design

Lava Mine Sound Design Audio

Hello my name is Jackson John-Maire, today I will go over some sounds that I did in the above video. the clip is from a lava mine level created in UDK. Under the video clip I also included the sounds.

The Ambients:
 When I was creating the ambient sound my goal was to have an eerie type of environment. In order to get the sound the way it was envisioned. I went through my library for quite some time until the sounds poped out. The sound consisted of wind gust time stretched, then pitch shifted slightly; a kick drum loop that I ran through a low pass filter. After that they were blended to get the sound I was looking for.

Lava Flow:
For the lava flow I knew in my head what I wanted it to sound like, so once more I went to my library and started searching. It is strange, but I would hear the most unrelated sound and know that the sound would some how make sense later on and I would take it. To get the lava flow, I used a recording of frying bacon, a recording while inside a carwash machine, wind, and crowd clapping then blended them till it was to my liking. For all the sounds  I used spectral pitch shift and bin shift. The carwash audio was all over the place so I used a vocal riding plug in to I guess tame it down to my liking.

Fire Pot:
The fire pot out of all the sound I felt was the easiest to recreate. Once more while listening to the sounds in my library, I came across sound of clothing rustling and rain drops falling on a roof top. what I did was put the clothing sound through a lowpass filter and the raindrops I ran it through pitch shift Plug in.

Steam:
This sound gave me the most grief I went through countless amount of variations, and none of them worked. It's crazy, but the last sound that I attempted was a storm loop with rain fall on a metal shed. when I heard the sound right away I new it would work. what i did was time shift the loop then pitch shifted it slightly, and finally slightly EQ the loop to my liking.

My main goal for the sounds where to get a realistic sound. listening to my final sounds I felt that the main goal was accomplished. The sounds where created from the most unrelated sounds, but I felt at the end they sounded like the end product that was intended. With the sound I tended to stay away from over processing. The closer to being natural, I felt would give it a more realistic feel and a more immersive experience to the consumer.

The project in all was educational and fun, but at times frustrating when the sounds did not work as expected. The end clip did not demonstrate the quality of the sound I created. This was due to some technical difficulties with my DAW. Logic that night was just not working for me it crashed countless amounts of times, and the one time I did not save is when it happened. Then the next day in Lab for what ever the reason my sound where phasing and for the life of me I could not figure out what was causing it to phase. Unfortunately this was the last day in lab and ended up running out of time. I have included the audio files in a link above. So you have a better view of what my intentions where, but do to unforeseen circumstances I was not able to get the expected end project.