Creating a variety of Glitches
Hello everyone, this is Josh from the Transported Audio team! We recently wrapped a feature film for Netflix (it’ll be streaming next month!), and the project provided a unique opportunity for tons of glitchy sound effects. How, you might ask?
Here’s a screenshot from the film. Those color bars and 8-bit looking shapes aren’t small happy accidents – these are all rapidly animating, flickering overlays that are sprinkled throughout many sections of the film. There are literally hundreds of them! Not only that, but the visual style of these graphics changes based on the scene. These no doubt keep the film highly entertaining, and stylistic flair like this absolutely screams for creative sound design.
Being the sound designer for the film, it was ultimately up to me how best to approach the glitches. My goal was to keep our added glitches consistent over the entire film, and to introduce alternate layers to keep each scene sounding fresh. Instead of grabbing glitches from a sound library, I decided to create my own “glitch base” so that our effects would be unique to TA. From here I could utilize library glitches as an additional layer to add more variety to each instance of them. This project was on a tight turnaround time, so I needed a quick process to be able to cover large sections of the film with glitches quickly.
The base of the glitch sound is a fairly simple Amp Stutter. I wanted this effect to have variation, character, and cover a wide range of the frequency spectrum.
Once I’d built the amp stutter, I used the Sci-Fi plugin that comes with Pro Tools to add grit and grainy textures. I cycled through the factory presets to see what they sounded like. I really liked the preset Alien Talk 3.
One thing I noticed upon adding the Sci-Fi plugin is that it introduced a bit of harshness to the higher frequencies. I notched this out using an EQ, and then boosted some of the mid-high frequencies to add a bit of clarity.
I then pitched the overall effect down to achieve a bit more beefiness. A quick way to do this is to change your tracks from elastic audio to polyphonic. Use the hotkey alt+5 to bring up the elastic properties box. Select your clip and enter how many semitones up or down you wish, hit enter and it will process the clip.
Now for the fun part! To create the glitchy sound quickly I used a tremolo. I used a square wave and set the tremolo so that the audio would completely cut out, creating that choppy glitch sound. For the rate/speed, I honestly went by feel. I processed the effect at different rates and played it back with picture to see if it fit the timing of on-screen glitches. This all helped to create our base layer, so from this point on it was all about creating variation in the design for each individual glitch.
After this I chopped up the effect and moved parts around to create some variation for the basic glitches.
There are also glitch effects in the video that grow or shrink across the screen. For those I used Vari-Fi to speed up or slow down the glitches over time.
Now that we have the base effect, we can start layering glitches from a library. Below is a glitch from the finished project with layers.
Looking back on it all, the process of creating a base layer for the glitch effects significantly sped up my design process and allowed me to spend more time being creative. I was able to create a decent amount of variation while maintaining consistency throughout the film by chopping up the base layer and arranging it in lots of different ways. Hopefully these glitches have added at least as much excitement to the film as the visual stutters and graphical glitches.
Thank you for reading!
– Josh
Creating the Voice for an Antique Robot
Hey this is Austin from the TA team. We’ve been working on a project that includes a unique robot character – let’s call him Mr. T. This blog post is about how we created Mr. T’s voice from scratch.
Mr. T is an older, mechanical robot. His character has a lot of heart and soul, and his best friend happens to be human. Mr. T doesn’t have an expressive face, so most of his communication is left to our sound team. Our core objectives were to find the character and timber of Mr. T’s voice, and then use it in specific and deliberate ways for every moment he should communicate verbally.
First, we played the project from beginning to end and begin considering Mr. T’s emotional arc. I created spot notes, paying close attention to context, asking myself questions like:
- What is going on in this scene around Mr. T?
- What are his expectations?
- How does another character’s motivations affect his emotional responses?
We sat down with my “Mr. T’s Emotional Response Spot Notes” document, started experimenting with my own voice into a microphone and hit record. I tried to follow my notes, but also reacted to other characters in the scene as if I was playing the role of Mr. T.
I tried to stay conscious of the actual sounds I was vocalizing. Mr. T knows how to say a few simple English words, but he definitely isn’t a chatty character. Most of what we recorded were just raw vocalizations like groans, “huhs”, “ums”, etc. I tried saying words like “ok” and “no”, which helped give us a little freedom to be even more emotionally deliberate. Once we had a lot of decent takes for each vocalized “line”, we began pulling “selects” to construct one single track containing all our favorite options.
At this stage, everything sounded like my raw voice babbling. The emotional intention was captured, but still pretty raw in terms of quality. Now it was time to shape these into a sonic profile for a small, old robot.
After finishing the recordings, we began playing with some granular textures using Native Instrument’s sampler, Kontakt. To do all this, we exported the recordings out of Pro Tools and brought them into Kontakt. Our plan with Kontakt was to stretch things out in order to deliberately introduce digital artifacts, and then squash things back down to make fit back into the proper timing.
In Kontakt, we set up a signal flow system so that we could hit record and just jam, allowing the original recordings to loop while tweaking parameters on the fly. Now we could freely experiment and remove any bad takes later on. The parameters we tweaked were time, pitch and grain size. These three parameters together influenced how stretched out something could be, and the sampler’s ability to smooth out artifacts. In order to deliberately introduce artifacts, we had to stretch things out pretty drastically. If things started sounding weird, I was encouraged!
Once we had a nice collection of Kontakt recordings, I began shortening the stretched out recordings using pitch/time based AudioSuite plugins in Pro Tools. For some words or moments I’d do a little extra pitching as well. It definitely lost its human quality by now – the digital artifacting helped to define its robotic details.
Our next step was to select and cut down the recordings, pick our favorite clips and time them to picture. We kept our eyes peeled for takes that were emotionally accurate, technically interesting and original. We also tried adding things like little stutter edits and repeated frames to further emphasize the robotic nature of Mr. T’s voice.
Another goal we had was to make these sounds feel like they were coming out of an old, small robot. The first place my mind went was to old, dinky guitar amps. This would make his voice sound like it’s coming from an imaginary, tiny speaker in Mr. T’s body. To achieve this, we boxed in and distorted Mr. T’s dialogue track. It’s easy to go overboard with an effect like this, so we tried to exercise restraint while using Fab Filter’s multiband distortion plugin, Saturn. Finally, we now have a set of vocalizations for Mr. T as an emotional character, which also incorporates aspects of his size and materials.
As we reflect back on this process, I think the most important factor was being as emotionally deliberate as possible in Mr. T’s performance. Deciding what he’s feeling, and finding the simplest way to convey it, was essential. The order of operations ended up being fairly simple: establish an emotional sound that’s relatable and easily understandable, then figure out how to separate it from humanity and stylize it to sound unique.
Sound design is a great medium for technical and creative expression, especially as storytellers. To be able to work on a project like this from a character and story-based intention, and then use unique technical processes to achieve it, required some finesse but absolutely paid off. Opportunities like this allow us sound people to flex all of our muscles.
We live for creative challenges like these!
TA 2018 Year in Review
2018 is already coming to a close!! This year really feels like it flew by for us. Let’s take a moment to step back and see all the exciting developments from the past year at our studio.
What a year it’s been for our team. We began 2018 mixing Season 3 of El Chapo on Netflix. It was quite the experience finding the creative signature of the show’s climactic 13 episode arc, with 40+ minute episodes giving us a full palette of characters and scenes. We cannot thank the sound editorial team at Bright & Guilty enough, as well as the Bad Idea, Univision and Netflix teams for this wonderful experience.
We also had the unique opportunity to mix episodes of several shows for Wham Network on Twitch! This is a super fun channel bubbling with fresh gaming lifestyle content. We even got to sound design all the show graphics and transitions, creating unique 8-bit audio signatures for the differing shows.
Next, we got to sound design and mix an incredibly creative futuristic film that included fist fights, magic and weapons. We can’t go into many details about the film until it’s released, but wow was this a fun one!!
As in previous years, we were able to design and mix many trailers for video game campaigns as well. Some of the highlights included full campaigns for Hitman 2 and The Elder Scrolls Online. We always have so much fun on these projects and love working with our partners at Dark Burn Creative.
We also had the great opportunity to work on lots of new videos with our collaborators at Muskrat Content, Red Bird Productions, Universe Creative and Working Nation. These included a variety of videos for Paramount, TV Land, Banner Health, The Gates Foundation as well as the ongoing “Do Something Awesome” campaign for Working Nation. We are so thankful to our many collaborators for all of these fun opportunities and more.
Our TA team expanded by one late this year!! Sound Editor Brandon Schuster is the newest member of our team, and he’s been a welcome addition both around the studio and on many of our projects. You can check out his full bio on the About page of this site.
There are lots of exciting developments coming up in 2019, starting right away with our move to bigger rooms on January 1st. These new rooms will be much more comfy and spacious, so please come on by for a tour to check them out! We’ll eventually post new studio pictures of them too.
Also, we have a brand new Transported Audio studio mascot!!! We won’t spoil the surprise, but be on the lookout on our social channels for a full reveal very soon.
Transported Audio 2017 Year in Review
This year has been filled with incredible growth, development, amazing projects and a big studio expansion! Looking back on it all, we have a great deal to be thankful for.
In early January, we moved into our new studio space. It took us almost two months to get fully up and running, and the studio turned out great. Feedback from clients visiting our facility has been resoundingly positive.
Later in January, we traveled to Sundance to watch two longform narrative projects Transported Audio sound edited and mixed, Playdates and Gentefied, premiere to the world! It was an awe-inspiring experience. Park City is such a charming town with lots of fun pockets to explore. We also got to meet talented people from all over the world similarly in town for the festival.
As new projects started rolling in at our studio, we had the great pleasure of working on videos for:
- The US Army
- Nissan
- Star Wars Battlefront
- Mass Effect
- Elder Scrolls
- Spike TV
- Wagner Brakes
- Avery Paper Products
In June, we upgraded our studio speakers to Genelecs, a huge quality jump from our previous JBL speakers. Mixing in our studio immediately sounded 1000x better.
By August, it became abundantly clear that our team needed to expand. Austin Chase came aboard as our new in-house Sound Editor and hopped aboard projects right away. His devotion to improving his craft and bright attitude have been a breath of fresh air, bringing so much more than just his sound expertise to our team.
The later part of the year brought some new areas of workflow expansion, including mixing VR experiences for Coca Cola and the US Army. These were so much fun to sound design and tag team with Marc Weber, our talented VR mixer.
Instead of the year winding down to a close, the projects just kept on coming! A sample of those we sound designed and mixed include:
- Over 30 videos for Star Wars Battlefront 2
- Numerous videos for Lawbreakers
- Battlefield 1
- Marvel games
- Promos for Netflix, FX network, Amazon Prime and Lionsgate
- Reebok
- Budweiser
- Walmart
- Yelp
- Lyft
- Top Golf
- California Closets
- Tidal
- The Soul Train Awards
- Kaiser Permanente
- The Gates Foundation
- Ronald McDonald House
- Education Through Music
- A short film about Bruce Lee
We’d be remiss if we didn’t thank our additional sound designers and mixers who have been instrumental in keeping our quality bar high and hitting various tight deadlines. Kevin Senzaki, Richard Shapiro, Mitchell Lestner, Cody Flick, Paul Fonarev, Charles Moody, John Dion, Peter Bawiec and Joshua Johnson – you’ve all brought so much to our growing team and words cannot fully express how grateful we are for your continuing support.
Looking ahead, we have some very exciting things on the horizon in 2018. Austin recently moved into our first Sound Edit suite at the studio, where we’re going to treat the walls in his room soon. In our main mixing studio, we’re massively upgrading our Protools station to ensure it can handle the biggest, most intensive projects. We’re also re-tuning the monitors in this studio to make sure playback in the room sounds as perfect as possible.
Thank you for an all-around incredible year. We’d love your feedback on it as well – what can we do to improve? How can we make your projects sound even better? What are you looking for in a sound team? If you haven’t already, please come check out our studio and let us know what you think.
We can’t wait to build on everything with even more new people and projects in 2018!!
Sincerely,
Eric Marks
Founder, Transported Audio
Creating a Hush Box
Hi everyone,
My name is Austin Chase and I’m a new sound editor here at Transported Audio! Eric brought me aboard in August and it’s been a wonderful first few months. I’ve already had the pleasure of working on numerous exciting and unique projects during my time here. These include over a dozen Star Wars Battlefront II videos, some intense repairing of dialogue recorded in the 1960s and, more recently, designing and building a custom projector hush box for our studio! This blog post will primarily focus on the hush box project.
The purpose of this project was twofold: to keep the client projector at a low temperature, and to prevent the noise of the projector from becoming a distraction in our studio.
Projectors are essentially big lights that create a ton of heat and, in turn, need big fans to keep them cool. The easiest way to minimize this fan noise is to contain the projector inside a sound-insulated box. However, enclosing the projector also insulates heat, so it’s necessary to create an intake/exhaust airflow system using computer fans. The bigger the fan blade, the slower and quieter you can run the fan. The downside to this is that it creates bigger holes in the box itself, allowing more of the projector’s fan noise to escape. To solve this, airflow channels must be created to keep air moving in the right direction and contain the noise where it belongs: inside the box and away from the ears of anyone in the studio.
This project started months ago on internet forums and YouTube videos, where I slowly started to grasp what the best design would be for our needs. We came up with a plan and started gathering supplies. From powering the fans, to cutting holes in what used to be a wood wine box, we hit our fair share of technical hurdles. Two film/sound guys at Home Depot looking at hole saws is also just a ridiculous sight. Regardless, Eric and I did a solid job picking out the necessary tools and supplies.
Here’s a diagram of the box as it was coming together. The intake fan on the right brings cool air into the chamber, while the two fans on the left pull hot air out of the box. The wooden slats on either side of the projector prevent noise from the projector’s own fan from escaping out through the holes in the box.
During the design process, we realized that this box had to look good too. A giant wooden box in the middle of a mostly black studio would look dorky and unprofessional, so we decided to cover the box in a simple black fabric that we got from Michael’s. This store also supplied our hush box lens, which is just the glass from a small picture frame (a genius idea that Eric came up with).
This project required a great deal of unfamiliar knowledge and skill, but we took our time and managed to slowly put this thing together without running hitting any major issues along the way. It’s now up and running, but we are still making adjustments to the box- I imagine this will be an enjoyable work in progress for a while. One thing is for sure- each day brings new opportunities to learn completely new skills here at Transported Audio.
-Austin Chase, Sound Editor
Strength in Numbers
Hey everyone,
We’re very excited to share that the Transported Audio team is growing!! We have a new dedicated sound editor aboard the team, Austin Chase. Austin is very upbeat, talented and brings a wealth of skills to our many projects. You can read all about him on our About page.
This summer has been a busy one! We wrapped several more Lawbreakers videos, including sound designing and mixing the almighty Lawbreakers launch trailer, Skilled AF. We were afforded lots of creative liberties on the project– it was an absolute blast to work on.
We’re also in the middle of wrapping up our second 360 / VR mix, a project we can’t share details about yet but surely will when it’s released. This unique format has provided some great opportunities to expand our workflow to include binaural mixing.
Among other projects, we recently mixed trailers for the games Elder Scrolls Online, Dirty Bomb, Pwnd, a short film entitled Bruce Lee: One Family, and branded content videos for UCLA and Ronald McDonald House. We also got to mix an energy-pumping short film called Not Normal, directed by Matt MacDonald.
If you haven’t already, come on by our studio to relax in the captain’s chair while we play you a 5.1 demo!
More to come soon,
Eric