March 2013

I found out about Ryan through fellow audio student Stephen Bernard and messaged him asking a few questions concerning the commission from Thorpe Park and the general recording process/ his role in the project.

This is the message I received back:

Hi Martin,

Unfortunately, i can’t tell you too much about the commissioning of the project itself. We were part of a third party arrangement i guess. Basically, we do a lot of work with a local oxfordshire video company called Studio 8 and they were the ones that actually got the commission, as their “sound guys” we then took hold of their video and stuck some gore into it 😉 I’m not entirely sure whether the job was advertised before studio 8 got it, or whether they were directly contacted. Could have been either 🙂

The brief we received was audio for 2 films with very similar content (we actually ended up doing 3 films, their up on youtube if you wanna have a look https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEXOw781GcCIZqx3PTxJjG8nP13VXpmQa). They both revolved around a zombie being operated on, reanimating, killing the surgeon, staring into the “audience” then running off screen. At that point in the ride an actor would run out and chase the audience lol. The male/female roles changed in the video so Thorpe Park could vary their actor’s. I think it was a haunted house/ maze installation, the audience would go from room to room and there’d be something different to scare them in each.

The creating the sounds was pretty simple. The gore was all made up of vegetables, fruit, jam & dog food being pulverised. Then we synced all the foley sounds like footsteps etc. We managed to get a hold of some chainsaw sounds which went in too. We didn’t go too deep into textures or sound design on this project unfortunately. Id just graduated and was still quite new to sound design so only added in some dark pads and bursts of static. I did use a granular processing plug-in called dronemaker (FREE http://www.michaelnorris.info/software/soundmagic-spectral.html). Which basically takes a load of samples from your audio file, varies their length and alters the spectral content. I applied that too the sound of an underground train approaching the platform (attached to the email, feel free to use it if you like). It gave a nice dynamic crescendo before the zombie attacks the surgeon. I think we ended up bringing it back in the final mix but it adds to the overall texture 🙂

Unfortunately we weren’t involved in any of the installation but we were told that the film would be played through a 60″ LCD screen to simulate a window with life size characters “on the other side” of it. There would be a series of speakers around the room, all that was required was a mono mix of the audio. I guess the whole point was for the audience to be “looking in” at a scene so a surround mix wasn’t really appropriate, could’ve been good for atmoshpere though.

Anyway, we delivered all of our work to Studio 8 and they consolidated it to the video and passed it on to the theme park 🙂

That’s about it really mate, i hope this helps you out, if you have any more questions though, feel free to drop me an email and i’ll be happy to help you out!

Ryan

As Studio 8 got the commission to create the videos (see YouTube link), he didn’t really know much about it, but I could find out more about that if I were to contact Studio 8 itself.
He gives some interesting information on how the various sounds were created which will definitely help me if I want to create similar sounds. He includes a download link to an interesting plug-in, but I’m unable to use it being a PC user 🙁 (I’m sure there’s something similar I could use on the University macs.) He also attached a sound sample of a train he used with the processing plug in which I’ll upload to here separately – it’s a very eerie sound, great for the kind of thing I’m going for, and I have permission to use it if I need to!

He was also good enough to divulge some of the info from the brief, in terms of installation, which I could use in the justification of my project ideas, and included that he thought more could have been done to add atmosphere to the installation, but that’s not what the park wanted.

In all this information has really helped my understand the sound artist’s role in such installations. Despite this being for video, there’s still some good info on how I could explain how my project could be used in such an environment.

Really happy 🙂

A couple of weeks ago, I sent out emails to Alton Towers and Drayton Manor. Shortly afterwards I received a message back from Alton Towers with a ‘Student Pack’ attachment (due to an abundance of emails from students they were unable to directly reply to my enquiry about how their audio installations are created). When looking through the pack I discovered that Alton Towers is completely internally run, including all media. I am still waiting on a reply from Drayton Manor to find if this is the case at their park.

However, when recently talking with another student (Steve Bernard) I found that he used to work with someone who was commissioned to create a soundscape for a similar purpose to my project by a theme park. I will contact him this week and include all correspondence in a later post.

Horrific Silence

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Ryan’s ‘Train – Dark’ sound sample.

Correspondence with Ryan Twyman of ‘Studio 8’, Oxford.

Theme park installations

Transfiguration