Eye Sentry Sound Design

 I created this short animation yeaaaaars ago after watching the 2013 film, Oblivion. I've finally decided to actually do some sound design for it! I really liked the sounds created for the robot sentries from the original film, so I wanted see if I could create something similar for this. 

I used Ableton Live 10 as I knew this project was going to be really MIDI intensive. Ableton also comes preloaded with a lot of stock tools and plugins that work with sound design. The finished session has 38 channels, a lot of which were running MIDI instruments. 

Most of the eyes sounds were generated using Native Instruments Massive, a few recordings of my laptop underside, a CD player and extra sound effects from Soundly. The Speaking noises were routed through a convolution reverb and EQ, from which I cut above 2khz, as well as boosting 230hz and 560hz to simulate the speaking coming from the middle of a (roughly) 1.5metre diameter sphere. This effects chain can be seen below:

For the weapon deploying sounds I actually used a mixture of recorded sounds and Massive. The channel list consisted of:

Weapon Deploy: A curtain rail sliding with a pitch shift, Waves Vitamin, NI Driver and EQ.

Fan Grill: Running my finger down the grill of my laptop

CD Drive: A USB CD drive opening

Weapon Air: An air compressor letting out air. Sourced from Soundly.

Charging Power Up: NI Massive

Charged: NI Massive..... again.

Beepbeep: NI Massive.... yet again. I thought the deploy needed a "Ready" beep.

Camera: This is actually the stopping of the mechanism from an old film camera I own.

Motors: Sound of a CNC machine motors. Sourced from Soundly.

Motor Hum: Just general electrical hum. Sourced from Soundly.

The "Tinkerbelle" sounds were from the Native Instruments Ethereal Earth Kontakt pack, pitch shifted up and running through Waves Doubler. On top of that, I also used some ocean noise, a flamethrower and swoosh noises from Soundly.