Legend of Zelda is a Nintendo produced video game that has games back all the way to 1986. The video I decided to do a project on is a teaser trailer for an upcoming - yet to be released - game.  Thus meaning I had no platform to take ideas from in –game noises and sounds that I could maybe do with previous games. However I did look into previous games for ideas as to what feel most Zelda games have.

Seeing as the scene is set in what is led to be believed as ‘Hyrule Field’ I remember from previous games the calm atmosphere during showing of the scenic and very nature-filled area. After assessing the video I began to plan out the process of tackling this project. I feel very into doing Sound for video games – so it made doing this Sound Design project a lot easier in all aspects. I had set aside recording time

for the process of gathering sounds, over a weekend outside of college.

The piece of equipment that we used was a Tascam recorder (Tascam DR-40),

which records on a stereo aspect with two small built in microphones which

can be used in an X-Y setting or AB setting by moving the microphones in or

out – enabling to direct the sound more on the sound source, or to capture

potential room sound .However on some sounds – such as the horse in the

clip running – I planned to record outside to capture the sound of outside open

air. A problem arose when the weather changed for bad over the whole weekend

and wind caused the microphone input to peak even at the lowest input level.

We had decided to open my kitchen door, and block off the sound of the kitchen

with a padded sheet, and recorded in a tiny blocked off area that enabled me

to use the recorder inside without wind disturbance – as I didn’t have access to

a wind shield at the time – but still capture the sound of outside to a various extent.

Apart from using Pro Tools 11, when at home I was unable to use the Avid software

we use in the college, I did have access to Ableton live Suite on my personal laptop

and managed to edit some sounds at home. I felt it worked better overall due to the

reverb plugins and some MIDI VST’s I have installed onto Ableton having a bigger effect on the audio as Pro Tools would. So I had edited them and exported the track individually as a WAV file, ready to import into Pro Tools onto a pre-specified marker I had put in a few weeks prior when I got back to college. I left the project for a while to work on Sound Design for my main coursework in my college course. I then picked this project up again and worked on it over a very short time as I was very eager to see what I could do with it. Apart from using Pro Tools 11, when at home I was unable to use the Avid software we use in the college, I did have access to Ableton live Suite on my personal laptop and managed to edit some sounds at home. I felt it worked better overall due to the reverb plugins and some MIDI VST’s I have installed onto Ableton having a bigger effect on the audio as Pro Tools would. So I had edited them and exported the track individually as a WAV file, ready to import into Pro Tools onto a pre-specified marker I had put in a few weeks prior when I got back to college.

I processed the tracks, using various amounts of plugins to shape the sound to any desired sound effects. I mainly used plugins such as reverb, and Pitch shift if I wanted the sound to be a little lower in tone or higher in tone – very slight as too much of an octave change can warp the audio and sound heavily edited. To finish the project I then bounced the session to a quicktime video and tested in a few different locations such as at home and on a set of low-quality speakers. I saw it fit fine and submitted the finished clip to my youtube page.