Tension Studios

This is an excerpt from the movie Zombies of Mass Destruction (ZMD) from Typecast Films.  I was the sound designer for the gore and zombie effect sequences, which turned out to be most of the movie. This video clip has been mixed so that everything except the sound design elements have been turned down.  Every sound used for this scene was an original recording done during post production.  Adam Smith-Kipnis was the foley actor for the extensive fruit and vegetable mutilation session, as well as the voice actor for the zombie.

In keeping with my spooky and gory nature, Tension Studios has been tapped to create the horrific sound design for ZMD, a feature length zombie movie. ZMD is being entirely filmed and produced here in the Seattle area by Typecast Films. Stay tuned for more info.

This is one of only two cutscenes from ED:R that is a remake of scenes from the original Evil Dead II movie. Since I’m a big fan of the movies, I really wanted to do this scene justice. I tried to ride the edge of campy and creepy, much as Raimi and Campbell did. Each of the possessed items had their own voice (acted by me and others in the studio) that joined in the chorus of laughter/madness. I used plastic bottle crunches and packing tape screeches to re-create the oddly harsh ratcheting sound of the deer head’s movement. The ending boom was from a series of percussive recordings I made at Fort Wordon, a retired military gun emplacement on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. The music was an edit of some sections from an orchestral library, since at this point we didn’t have room in the budget or schedule for a real musical treatment.

Sound Design, character acting, composition, 5.1 mix encoded into Dolby PLII.

http://www.vimeo.com/770311

Here’s another cutscene work print with a full sound design and mix treatment. There is a magical “temporal” explosion happening in the background while the foreground is primarily dialog and a few SFX. 5.1 mix encoded into Dolby PLII. The vocal treatment for the possessed Yanus was a variation of the pre-verb technique; reversing the content, running the reversed content through some reverb and recording it, reverse the reverb print and playing it back in sync with the original content. This gives a great ‘ethereal’ quality to voices. But I wanted to convey more of a possession or occupied-by-evil sound so I didn’t reverse the original content when I recorded the reverb. The result is that there’s still that reversed reverb sound but also a speaking-in-tongues feel to it.

Sound Design, Foley, 5.1 mix encoded into Dolby PLII

This is my mix of the Midway logo movie. I was asked to create an alternate ending for the HD version of the logo. While I was doing that, I was so annoyed by the over-used distorted swooshes that seem to be used for every game publisher logo I decided to remix the whole thing. I wanted to use a wider frequency range so as the logo flies in there’s a low filter sweep bass element and the movement of the individual graphic elements are highlighted by processed knife shwings and whooshes. The ‘Midway’ shake of the logo has some elements in it that allude to some of their more popular titles, but it’s so short it’s hard to pick them out. Regardless, it has an interesting detail that I like.

Sound Design, 5.1 mix encoded into Dolby PLII