Collaborating with Szymon and Monika in the Foley studio, we managed to capture some potentially useful sounds for layering. Whilst Szymon had ambience for Level 1 sorted by building some sounds on top of a field recording captured in London. We were struggling to work out how to record wind sounds. As neither of us possess microphones good for capturing wind specifically, we also found we got microphones out to capture wind, there was none… and when we had hadn’t rented out the microphones good at capturing wind… there was wind… So… we quickly decided that instead of hoping to get lucky we decided to resort to foley and other techniques for level 2.
In this video Ben Burtt talks about the ‘Wind Machine’ which was used for classic foley performance in early cinema. You would wind this wheel to cause friction between a fabric layer and wooden panels creating a screeching wind.
In this clip, Ben Burtt using a roll of fabric dragged over a carpet for wind sound. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything heavy enough, or a long enough stretch of carpet in a silent area to try this.
Szymon had experimented before with noise generators and filter notch sweeps. So that formed part of our wind, and then I got inspiration from a couple of podcasts about very simple and effective ways to create wind sounds.
In Ghost of Tsushima, a samurai open world game. Wind is used as a compass, it carries a certain mysticism to it which the sound designers explain during this podcast/video. The sound designers ended up using an assortment of wind instruments to contort and subtly obstruct a regular breath sound. The result being a kind of mystical spiritual wind sound.
I was also sort of influenced by Jason Singh, and whilst I wouldn’t dream of calling myself a nature beatboxer… his use of layered loop voice in this radio show to recreate the sound of ocean. Saying he just mimicked frequencies he could discern from a recording of the ocean until he had mimicked enough to recreate the ocean with his voice.