Logo Sound Design
After what felt like an eternity, I finally put my 2023 showreel online. Late May might not be the ideal time to present sound design work, but I was so busy at the beginning of the year that it was March before I knew it.
STITCHING
I started stitching the reel together in my spare time between other projects. I’m very lucky to have worked on lots of great films and TV shows since my last showreel, so I was able to pick and choose what to include rather than scraping around for material.
There were some wonderful filmmakers and companies, many of which I have worked with multiple times: Rural Media, Block B Films, Northern Heart Films, Greenfingers Films, Beth Rowland, Micheal Fitzgerald and Jess Leen. Some of the work was comissioned by the BBC and others funded by BFI network.
FUSION
As the reel neared completion, I reminded myself of something I had wanted to do for a long time - a stylish audio logo. I had created a static version a few years ago, but this time around I felt non-animated one wasn’t going to cut it.
Cue the beginning of my research into something I hadn’t done since my college days: animation.
I use Da Vinci Resolve for basic video editing and converting files, so the Fusion engine which comes with the free version was the obvious choice to work with. There are a milion dissolving text and logo tutorials on YouTube so I fairly quickly found some which I thought would work.
Two different animations ended up in the final animation, one for the bubbling and fizzing ‘o’ in dissolve, and one for the wiping away of the logo at the end. As Fusion is so complex, there was a bit of a learning curve and I basically just followed the tutorials without a deep understanding the engine as such.
The result came out pretty well and I now had a moving logo to which I could add some sound design.
EXPERIMENTS
For the fizzing I sourced clean tablet dropping and fizzing sounds, some of which were recorded with hydrophone for a true underwater sound. I also got the chance to experiment with one of my favourite plugins which I have honestly neglected far too much: Adaptiverb by the incredible German company Zynaptiq.
It has one of the most unusual interfaces of any reverb, and is most definitely a sound designer’s dream. Turned up to 100% wet, it transforms the source sound in the most magical of ways while still retaining some of the character of the original. I combined this with an impact to fill out the low portion of the frequency spectrum.
I then set about creating the wipe. I wanted something a little bit gritty, with it sounding as if the text is being destroyed or ripped apart. I layered the sounds of waves and leaves rustling with some more designed effects, ending with a boom, riser, and whoosh, all with reverb tails.
TONALITY
Musically, audio logos often have a major key tonality so my first few passes all leaned this way. With nothing sitting quite right, I gave it some more thought and told myself that my logo is dark and gritty. There was no need to graft on an unsuitable tonality, and right away the minor keys started to feel right.
I experimented with another plugin which I don’t think I ever used before and is absolutely wonderful: Molekular, part of the ridiculously powerful Reaktor engine. I fed some of the sounds into this and the result was a glitchy riser which had that perfect logo quality.
I aslo used a rising chord from Omnisphere as well as and 8dio string patch to fill out the swell towards the end.
With all of these in place, I set about tuning the pitched sound design elements to the correct key and the logo was born. It’s at the beginning of the reel, see what you think!