Gears of War is a very heavy sounding, gritty game. When I took up this task I knew there would be one gun sound included along with some monster sounds, and I knew I had to make sure at least one thing within the project sounded heavy and/or full. And thus looking at it from a ‘trailer’ point of view – it had to sound cinematic. The planning of this project went about quite smoothly, as the game the trailer is from, I have played. The dark atmosphere and fast-paced trek is well shown within the clip.

The recordings that I recorded with the Tascam recorder (Tascam DR-40) with no extra microphones used for it, I decided to keep with the internal microphones for easy manoeuvring to record sounds – some of which were recorded weeks in advance with another project and just transferred the sounds over. A particular sound I recorded was the sound of a droplet of water in a puddle, I could have recorded in my kitchen

where there was a larger body of water in the sink; instead I recorded a drop of

waterfalling from a soaked Q-tip bud into a filled basin in our small bathroom.

The reverberantspace made the editing of the sound a lot easier as I never

had to add too much reverbto the clip – thanks to the small space I recorded in.

Despite the knowledge of the Gears of War franchise in my head (and many others), seems to be heavy and gritty – I took a very atmospheric path in terms of the sound of the overall clip. The video isn’t full of sound effects for every minute detail, but isn’t as empty to make it feel bare. There was a very balanced mix between sound effects and atmosphere, without ruining the clip as a trailer point of view.

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As I do with any sound design and/or recording project. I bounced to a quicktime video and made sure the video sounded okay in different places – I even asked my younger brother to test the video on his devices – giving that information of what sounds good where and possibly what needed to be boost.