Sounds Of The Unknown

Despite the final mix being complex, as sound design was often competing with the music in the mix, we still created a detailed and absorbing sound design track. We tackled Planet Unknown in stages creating separate audio projects for ambience, rocks, impacts, robots driving, robots moving, vocalisations and music.

To create unique and interesting fire sounds for the meteors we recorded a fire poi artist named Natatie Bibi. The sounds were recorded relatively simply using an H5 Zoom recorder. We then created an instrument in Izotope Iris using different layers of the cyclical fire sounds. When played on a midi keyboard the results were dense and the obvious cyclical nature lost. These mutations were used throughout for the meteor fire effects.

There is a huge amount of driving in this film so we needed to create a lot of different driving sounds. The engines sounds are a variety of layers including recordings of an electric toothbrush and the sound of chains being rattled. We used Izotope Iris again, layering in the audio, and playing it back at different pitches. The lower pitch sounds being used for slower speeds moving up through to the higher pitches for top speed.

Each robot has it’s own character as well, so you’ll hear a distinction between their engine and mechanical sounds. In the story, the blue robot gets left behind as it’s slightly slower. So you can hear this in the sound design. The engine sounds are clankier and the acceleration poorer. Whereas the orange robot is slick and well tuned.