Aggressive Bystander – Voice-Overs

This week I’ve been focused on getting some voice-overs done for our game, voice-overs are essentially all of the sounds that can’t be produced using sound effects and digital tools in a DAW (digital audio workstation)

The sounds we were going to try and produce was the sounds of our various characters getting hit by various blunt objects or getting shot, there was also the matter of producing the sound of a crowd chanting various non-propaganda like chants which was sort of difficult. I started out with just randomly grunting into my microphone to try to simulate people getting shot or injured. The most difficult part of making the sound of our main character getting injured was to actually imitate an old man, which is harder than you might think.

After our recording session we ended up with a bunch of grunts and moans for the sounds called Enemy Melee, Range, AOE and Main Character Death and for the AOE enemy’s attack, which is essentially their chanting, we ended up with just a bunch of random chants and rhymes which I will edit in order to give the illusion of an actual crowd shouting out complaints and demands.

One of our Area of Effect enemies.

I haven’t had time to process these sounds like I have with all the other sfx I’ve done so far, for example adding some effects like delay, reverb, flanger, chorus and phaser. If you’re not familiar with any of these effects and would like to learn more I recommend clicking this link and read a bit about it.

http://www.uaudio.com/blog/modulation-effects-basics/

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may00/articles/reverb.htm

With these effects I can affect the way we perceive the sound itself, for example: where the sound is coming and if I’m successful you should also be able to tell how the surroundings look like without actually looking.

When recording your own audio it fairly vital to be able to add effects and to be able to process the audio in order to make it suit your needs. For example when producing the sound for an angry mob of protesters it might be nice knowing you don’t actually need to gather up a large crowd with each and everyone in the said crown wielding a megaphone, those things can be added digitally when processing your audio.  Of course if you happen to have a crowd of say…..oh, I don’t know….20 people laying around that comes with matching megaphones…I say go for it, but if you don’t, to master your audio digitally is very convenient.