Self Induced Deadline Fever + The Monster Noise

April 1st. That's what I set as the unofficial deadline to finish the short film portion of this final project. I'm almost done, but I feel as if I've been almost done for more than a week now. All I have left to do, however, is color correcting and rotoscoping, and I think I can finish in time.

Now to move on to something a bit more exciting, an explanation of how we created The Monster's screech. Alexa and I wanted it to have some human voice in there, along with many inhuman noises. So one of the days we met I got a bunch of samples of Alexa making... noises. First, we started with some things The Monster would say like "I'm sorry", and then we moved on to the just plain silly (Alexa making the noise of a sheep, gargling water, etc).

Eventually, I felt we got enough sounds, and I dropped them into the Final Cut file (this was back when the project was just a baby). I had fun mixing the sounds into one fluid noise. I layered them all on top of each other, adjusted the volume, speed, and pitch of each, and even reversed some until we got our perfect screech... almost.

this is only like half of the sounds

The last couple steps included me reversing the whole thing, slowing it down a bit, and copying the front half, reversing it again, and adding it to the end.

This way I was able to make the waveform more like a bell curve, allowing it to naturally trail in and trail out... like a real screech would (probably).

the shape of the waveform I was trying to achieve

the final waveform