Our SFX travel through genres and styles and never tire to entertain with their stories. Let us take you right into the making of a great library and a video game masterpiece…
You’ve been wondering: how does BOOM Library create these special collections? What does the process behind them look like? How do they approach their work? Read on – we’re sharing with you our exciting sound stories from A-Z. Get an exclusive insight into the world of BOOM productions and the final use of the product, going all the way through background facts, failures and the final success. We call this section “History Of A Sound” (HOAS).
Vegetable Primavera Meets Brute Force
With all the food we used for creating the CLOSE COMBAT library we could have probably also fed a whole farm. In this context, most of you understand the causal connection between a smashed zucchini and flying fists, right? Let’s say with the CLOSE COMBAT library production we kind of examined the scope of food conventions and managed to enter a whole new world of legendary (non-food) video game fights.
But let’s start from the beginning: our first approach to this new library was a very practical – and to be honest – a selfish one. To put it short: we personally needed some good new fist-fights and similar sound scenarios as we have been missing high quality punch, kick and especially body fall sounds. We wanted both modern as well as realistic and exaggerated, aka old-school sounds. We wanted to put together a package that spans the full breadth of brutal to almost comic-like so we pretty much tried to record a library which caters for everything ‘fist fight’ related. Punches, bone breaks, kicks, body falls, clothing movements and whooshes of all sorts. We also wanted to include blood and gore sounds as well as a few exertion vocalizations to really provide the whole package. True to the slogan “the journey is the reward” we started our brute backyard mission.
Out Of The Box: Trial And Error
To create the realistic closeness of this kind of tight brawls we had to think out of the box and be even more experimental than usually, which for example included testing across the vegetable patch:
“I think we punched every single vegetable and meat available in our local supermarkets. We also tried to freeze certain vegetables and break them in a frozen state to give them a slightly different sound. Watermelons were definitely one of the favourites. You can smash them, punch the inside, create disgusting squish sounds and clean the whole mess up by just eating the leftovers.”
Apart from healthy ‘fresh’ fruits, we just thrashed everything that had a tight outer shell and we also didn’t spare raw animal products:
“Meat actually works quite well as it has a slightly wet character. However, it might sound too brutal at times. So generally, I’d recommend punching bags, stuffed leather jackets and similar things. Leather enclosing soft inner parts worked very well to not only capture those special high sound elements but also create the appropriate sound image of a certain size of the subject.”
“We also had old footballs which were wrapped into various materials to provide some ‘crunch’ before the actual impact. Sometimes a softer punch sounded much better than a harder one and it required a lot of testing to find out which methods were better than others.”
You can imagine our old studio was an absolute mess after the recording sessions. One can probably still smell the remains of dead vegetables, fruits and meat down there…
Dedicated Investment
As each production process naturally calls for a creative approach, we came up with various more or less brilliant ideas. Axel remembers with amusement:
“Apart from attacking vegetables, we even attacked each other and hit ourselves to find out if we could get any useful results out of it… but I have to admit we got no more than red cheeks. Well, now we’ve done that, too – it just adds to our trial and error list and makes us wiser. ;)”
Sometimes what seems to be a great idea in the first place later turns into a defeat – and that’s all part of the production process. All in all, the effort for the CLOSE COMBAT library was immense: we did an extremely large amount of recording, but also added a few synthetic sounds to it. We have actually tried a lot of different approaches to create the typical high smacking sounds we aimed at:
“We used white noise and the typical analogue snare sounds as a basis. To create that certain low-end for punching sounds, I recommend rooms that aren’t completely acoustically dead. This often creates resonances in the low frequency range that for once enrich the recording in a positive way. We also tried to vocally imitate the punches for only a few sounds. After a little processing, this worked surprisingly well to produce the typical slap-in-the-face sound.”
“Room resonance can have a positive effect on sound effects with such heavy and short transients. However, a lot of thorough low-end check-ups on every single sound were required and I remember editing about a thousand bass-tails to make sure we don’t take up too much headroom after the initial impact.”
In the end, a great new SFX library was born, all ready for roundhouse kicks and action-packed fight scenes. Take a look at the CLOSE COMBAT demo video:
Becoming Mortal Kombat X
Adding sound to the Mortal Kombat X game was just a great project and not only has the CLOSE COMBAT library been used for scoring the MKX SFX, but far more of our BOOM genetics gets to contribute its part to this AAA title game: we applied sounds from GUN HANDLING, ASSAULT WEAPONS, DEBRIS, MAGIC, NATURE ESSENTIALS, WINDS OF NATURE, FLOWING WATER, PRAIRIES
, TROPICAL FORESTS, THUNDER AND RAIN, MEDIEVAL WEAPONS, SCI-FI, CINEMATIC TRAILERS, CINEMATIC HITS, CINEMATIC METAL, SUVS and VANS, TRAINS, CREATURES, HORSES and even more. The MKX crew gave us clear guidelines to run with:
“The in-game sounds were still too unrealistic at that time and they wanted us to mix our BOOM sounds with the already existing setting to let it appear more authentic.”
As an extract, we’d just like to name three specific CLOSE COMBAT sounds – including their origin – that made their way into the final game:
1. CC-DS Blood Splash Hard.wav
For this sound we took all kinds of blood and splatter sounds from the CK, rearranged and edited them usefully so they would blend together nicely.
2. CC-DS Bone Break Hard 02.wav
Aside from the typical recordings of vegetables and salad, we broke noodles, nuts and eggs for this sound. Combine these with tearing apart some meat and you’ll get that – in a positive sense – mean and brutal sound of breaking bones.
3. CC-DS Slap Bright Hard 02.wav
This file is an example for the above mentioned high beating sound that was conceived by adding a vocally recorded punch to it, as well as several other sounds from the CK. Lots of leather and a slight whooshing-in result in this classic slap in the face.
It made our work a lot easier to arrange the sounds with both the Construction Kit and the Designed version:
“It worked so well to use the Designed sounds and to add more details to them by using the Construction Kit files. The CK sounds also worked great as additional background noise: for example using single tracks of the shotgun CK as distant shots in the background. Furthermore, the libraries are flexible enough to adjust to and to blend with different stylistics. In this case, Mortal Kombat definitely has its own aesthetic tone colour that is nicely exaggerated, and crispy and impulsive at the same time. Our library sounds offer enough material to serve and to shape these styles.”
Happy Ending
And what did the MKX crew say? To get to the heart of it: “Great work! We’d do it again anytime!”
Not just the NetherRealm team was very satisfied with the collaboration and the outcome. Felix, one of our Senior Sound Designers and MKX Project Manager, summarizes:
“Working for the Mortal Kombat franchise was an incredible honour and privilege – and, not least, great fun. Creating and finding the right sounds for the incredibly detailed, gripping cutscenes was definitely a challenge out of the ordinary. While the NetherRealm team was kind enough to share their sound design efforts with us to create a unified soundscape, we nonetheless enjoyed great creative freedom. To have been a small part of the team that created the sound of the masterpiece that is MKX is something I won’t soon forget.”
Hands up: who doesn’t like happy endings? We love them!
Curious Now?
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