supi's portfolio

my final project for another sound design class. the actual concept of the project is pretty similar to the first one, basically taking some video clip and redoing all the sounds for it. i started playing through the doom megawad epic 2 (great wad btw) around the same time i had to figure out what i wanted to do for my project, and i figured it would work excellently, since it has potential for a nice sonic atmosphere, and there arent too many enemies which would make mixing much easier. plus, the projects were due on doom's birthday, the 10th of december, so it was clearly meant to be. the gameplay you see is my own demo, with the pipe-smoking sequence from ancient aliens map 01 stitched onto the back. i thought about adding some gameplay of the first map of back to saturn x after that sequence, but because of time constraints i had to cut that

my initial plan was actually to make my own wad that replaces every sound effect, since there arent really that many (going off of decinos video on doom sounds there are only 107, which seems reasonable). i still might do something like that with the sounds i made, but because this project required us to mix in dolby atmos and present in 5.1, that wouldnt have worked. if anything, it was a blessing in disguise, since it gave me the opportunity to add sounds to things that didnt originally have any. either way, my thought was to make a soundscape that felt more realistic, almost like if you were to put doom 2016's sound design into the classic games. that definitely is not how it panned out. it still sounds like doom, which i dont think is bad, in fact im proud of it either way, but it isnt what i had intended.

i used a combination of pro tools and ableton live to make this project, with ableton handling the creation of original sounds, and pro tools for mixing everything together in atmos. id never really used ableton before, and its not really my thing, but i understand why its so many people's first choice for a daw. trying to use pro tools on a windows 11 laptop thats a few years old almost made me lose it. my first experience with it was not being able to place a marker, because the shortcut i used (enter on the number pad) wasnt an option on my truncated keyboard, and when i tried to change the shortcut, pro tools crashed. i swear, not even a minute would go by without an error message or pro tools suddenly not responding, even by doing the most basic things like scrolling through the tracks in the edit window. needless to say it was infuriating. i was so averse to even trying to use pro tools that i procrastinated the project like crazy, so in the span of two days, i had to put in about 20 hours of work to actually get it to a presentable state. i think thats why it didnt quite sound like a newer take on classic doom. in my haste to get it done, i relied a lot on my instincts, and since im so familiar with how doom should sound, i defaulted to that.

for the chicken run project, i mostly used sounds i found online (like on freesound.org), and then recorded my friends for dialogue. since so many sounds would be for things that dont actually exist, i wanted to focus a lot of attention on making my own sounds, especially since thats not something ive really explored before. i would guess that about 60% of the sounds were taken unedited from libraries. things like enemy projectiles and the sounds for the teleporter were done by me mashing sounds together in a sampler. the more video game-y sounds of pickups and powerups were done with synths (i think i mostly used meld?). finally, all the enemey grunts and cries were pitch-shifted recordings of my roommate. since theyre not so familiar with doom, i showed them pictures of the enemies i needed and had them independently figure out what they should sound like, since if i tried to record myself i know i would just try to imitate what they actually sound like. im pretty happy with the results, especially the hell knights. i like their idea for the revenants, but it unfortunately got lost in the mix most of the time. i left in the original midi for the music since eternal makes for a great dj in this wad

despite my mostly self-inflicted need to rush the project to completion, i think it turned out well enough. there are definitely some sounds i realized i should include after it was too late to go looking for them, let alone making them myself. there were some aspects of the panning that i thought sounded a bit off relative to the camera, but believe it or not, accurately mixing projectiles flying past you from a first person perspective that keeps rapidly swiveling around is really hard. i think for the most part i handled it well. also, since we were going to present them in a theater setup, i was worried that the gun shots would be too loud so i reduced them somewhat in the mix, which i dont think was actually necessary. speaking of, since i was mixing for a 5.1 surround sound theater setup, the youtube upload might be more quiet than you expect and have some odd panning, so dont hold it against me! despite the stress and some issues, im pretty proud of my work and it seemed that a lot of my peers were very impressed too.