Sound Design: Teckle splash screen for game

I should first mention that this is a splash screen for the Teckle game development team ( https://twitter.com/tecklegames ) which I happen to be composing music for along with the sound designing. This load up screen was created by Jiri Klic who is one of the programmers for the team, I refer to him as a wizard, the logo itself was design by the artist Mathew Lornie and as you would have guessed being the sound guy ( yes I am too a sound guy ;] ) I am the one applying audio to the animated splash screen and in this blog I will briefly talk my way through the production.

My first thoughts were, let's not over think this one Shane, get the box done first before you start thinking about the overall production (with music). I tend to imagine how it will sound before I've even done anything..things always change so I guess this shows I'm learning to be more logical. Whoop! Whoop!

So as per usual before thinking about recording sounds I have a quick browse through my already recorded library, which happened to give me exactly what I needed for this.

THE CUBE

Layer 1 - This layer is for the box itself which used the same audio sample for each hit and remained unchanged throughout the clip, this is because I imagines the box to be solid all over, so if I could physically touch it the material would be the same all over, so no matter where the box was hit it would still be the same solid material striking another, does this make sense? if not it should in a moment. For this I used the rubber top of a baby bottle being flicked.

Layer 2 - This is where each hit has it's own flavor of sound, as you will notice in the video that the box strikes the white surface at various angles, therefore the corners of the box are going to sound different from the flat edges along with the intensity of each hit so duplicating an audio sample is out of the question! For these sounds I used the popping sound of a milk cartoon filled at different levels (below half measures).

Layer 3 - For added effect I used the popping sound of my finger pulling out from the side of my mouth, I felt that this would enhance a less serious and more animated feel to the clip, again each sound was slightly different to the next and I tried to match each one to closest in velocity to the previous layer.

PANNING & VOLUME AUTOMATION

So after I synchronized all the hit points including some additional ones prior to the cube coming on-screen, the next step was to use volume and panning to follow the cubes movement, in this case from left to center.

MUSIC

The last thing to do was to fill in the empty space at the end and to have more impact on the "Teckle" writing appearing from the box, so to do this I thought that a nice shiny/glistening crescendo un-percussive sound would be more appropriate to fit into the game design it will be included in.

It took me about 6 attempts to get it how it sounds now! I thought I'd get in 2 but I guessed wrong, it happened when I was listening to previous songs that I had written for the Loci game when I heard one of the intros thought would fit, I tried it, edited it to fit and threw in a shimmer I made from the shiiiiing of my new bread knife sampled and edited in Ableton. I then went on to use the shimmer (or one of the many that I recorded) as a transition within the game when entering a flashback memory