Axel Rohrbach Special: Making of Cinematic Trailers

[Written by Axel Rohrbach]

Here is a teaser video showing some of the things we recorded:

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/23965688[/vimeo]

But this is only a very small part. Creating the “Cinematic Trailers” was one of the biggest challenges for us so far. The goal was to provide a designed collection with sounds having both, the quality you expect when you are in a cinema watching trailers and at the same time new and inspiring sounds. In addition to that, we wanted to put stuff into the “Construction Kit” that we never found in other sound libraries before.

We started with some basics, to get a feeling for which source sounds we need to create the “Designed” collection. We tried some things here and there, recorded flame whooshes with torches, fire balls and burning arrows. We did textiles whooshes, impacts and eerie Piano scrapes. After those basic standards it became difficult. We thought “having orchestra recordings for those typical rises would be awesome”. This is something used and needed very often, but besides music instrument libraries like “Symphobia” I don’t know of any sound fx library, especially in that price range, that contains such things. As BOOM Library is a spin-off of the audio production company Dynamedion (www.dynamedion.com), luckily we have access to a great and very experienced team for orchestra recordings. I instructed the orchestrators to arrange those orchestra-effects and let them some free space for experiments as well. We did the recording during one of the “Open Orchestra Recorcing Sessions” Dynamedion organizes several times per year, where the team books a high quality German orchestra for 2 days of recording and then gives everyone the chance to “buy in” the session to have music recorded. It is a great way to have smaller amounts of music recorded without needing to go through all the hassle and costs of organizing a complete session only for a few minutes of music.

Recording Taiko drums was another thing, not very typical for sound libraries yet very often used for trailer impacts. For the impacts we figured out that some really harsh crackling / breaking sounds are missing. That brought us to the idea of the plastic cups, shown in the video. We experimented with doormats, duct tape and glass. We put all kinds of stuff on a rope. We recorded very fast car drive bys with quiet engines to get rid of the car feeling as good as possible. Bike drive bys were very cool sounds as well as ski and snowboard pass bys. I had a vacuum cleaner around and recorded a pretty cool sound which actually sounds processed already, simply by turning it on and putting my hand in front of the tube and removing it again.
We prepared sustained sounds and swung speakers playing those sounds in front of the microphone, went to an airport to record starting planes and created some synthetic and processed sounds as well.

For the “Designed” collection we had some days of research before we started. We tried different new Plug-Ins, especially algorithmic reverbs and equalizers. Some new made into our PlugIn folders. I am personally very impressed by the sound of the Brainworx EQs. They are not very precise, but very nice sounding and clean. They replaced the Waves APIs on my system for now. Nebula3 is another EQ that is used quite often on the designed sounds. As for reverbs, all kind of plugins were used, only the Lexicon reverbs are new because they sound dense and crisp. We released two videos, going into the depth of the sessions of two sounds.

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/25078871[/vimeo]
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/25087367[/vimeo]

Spoken frankly, we are quite happy that this project is over, because it took way more time that we initially thought. However we are also happy because we use those sounds every day. I mentioned that in another interview before: we are our own best clients because we always do libraries that we are missing for our own daily work. Since the library has been released, we used the sounds in trailers already, I did the audio for a cinema logo animation of a VFX studio, used those sounds in movie scores as well as for in-game sound effects. It makes our lives much easier and I hope yours too. Together with Cinematic Metal it is a perfect combination to create fat trailerish title sounds. Thanks again to Charles Deenen for your support!

The greatest thing however is that we are indeed receiving tremendously good feedback from our customers at the moment. Honestly: after our first four releases we couldn’t imagine to have a fifth collection that would even be more acclaimed by our customers. Every release is so exciting: you never know if the sound designers out there will like it or not until the collection is being released. So this makes everything just more fun and inspires us to raise the bar with every new release.

Adam Stiles – Sound Designer (Trailer: The Dark Night, Gamer, Hellboy II: The Golden Army)
“There are so many sounds in here that aren’t anywhere else but needed so,so often. For example, to have that much taiko drum recording at that fidelity is worth the cost alone. Everything is fantastic, an excellent,excellent collection. With the Cinematic Metal library, you could almost do any high end trailer with those alone.
I’m so happy there’s a company like you guys out there. The need for these type of sounds are monumental. Especially for us at Riot Games, we need more, and more.”

Besides the demos, make sure to check out the “Facebook 500” sounds which you can download for free here.

Those are mostly created exclusively with the Cinematic Trailers library. Some sounds however do include our other libraries, mainly Cinematic Metal.

For some more information check out our website.