4: Process writeup - Final Fantasy XV redesign
Happy Monday, everyone! I hope you are all well, and have been staying warm as winter approaches.
This month, I completed my work on a redesign that I started in September for my reel - the Final Fantasy XV Scepter of the Pious redesign!
Bit by bit, I’ve been making strides in my sound designing process, as well as working faster, and the FFXV redesign seems to have been a huge marker of that. I’d love to share what my process and tool usage was like with you all.
Process
When I was preparing to work on this redesign, I watched the cutscene repeatedly to get a sense of what sounds I wanted to go for and the timing of each moment in the scene. I noticed there was quite a lot of movement and big moments that would need lead-ins, some sort of rise (or crescendo, if you will) to help build up to those impacts and make them more intense. I also noticed the amount of particle effects - sparkles, glowing light - present that made the scepter appear magical and ethereal, and that the weapons appeared glassy, almost crystal-like.
My first pass was thus spent designing the magic throughout the scene and building the impacts and lead-ins of those big moments. I relied heavily on glass-related samples - glass breaking, glass shards, glass tapping - and even a piano VST, which not only served to give the weapons their crystal feel, but whose tonal qualities were key to building the ethereal experience. The most important tool, however, was the plugin Valhalla Shimmer, a special shimmery reverb that adds rather sparkly reflections to any sound. I bought Valhalla Shimmer around the beginning of this year, but didn’t feel quite comfortable using it until recently when I hunkered down and read Scott Wilson’s notes which helped me better understand the plugin’s parameters. I knew early on that Valhalla Shimmer would be the best reverb plugin to use to bring out the dustiness and crispness of the magic, and I was not disappointed.
After completing the main components of the entire scene, I started honing in on different details. My friend Joe Bretz, aka @reverbinthevoid, took some time to listen to my first pass and gave me some feedback, particularly to give some more love to the low frequencies. From there, I utilized synthesis (via Logic Pro’s ES P synth) to create some bassy transients for each of the impacts as well as some deep, weighted whooshes leading in.
It was sounding great so far, but I felt that it just wasn’t… enough. The sound still felt a bit like it was missing some character to it that set it apart from just being a lot of sparkly magic. I pondered on what I could add, and then it hit me. Lore-wise in FFXV, the Scepter of the Pious is a royal arm granted to the main character Noctis by one of the ancestral kings. Why not add a layer of a spirit voice, as though the spirit of the king himself had awoken to grant Noctis his power?
I set about creating this spirit voice by first recording myself doing several vocalizations - deep breaths, “whoo”s, “ahhhhh”s. (Anything to sound like a ghost hehe!) I then layered these vocalizations together and pitched them down to create a more solemn and haunted mood. Finally, I processed them through Chorus, a modulation plugin that I used to create the effect of multiple voices sounding at once, and Convology XT, a convoluted reverb plugin that I used to manipulate the reverb and spread to make the vocalizations sound echo-y and as though they’re surrounding Noctis.
With this addition, the redesign was feeling a lot more filled out and full of actual emotion. All that was needed was a bit more polish, so I turned to my mentor Juan for a final round of feedback. He pointed out to me that the reverb was a bit too wet in some sections, and that more foley was needed to ground the magic in the last section to the physical weapons circling around Noctis and the impact of them bursting into thin air. I thus dove back into these sections and tweaked as needed - adjusting the reverb decays to dry up just a bit in the beginning, and adding whooshes and dry foley to add some physicality. The end result is the redesign seen above!
Tools breakdown
- Recordings: knife shings, glass breaking, glass shards moving around, glass tapping, water, sizzling pan, cabbage, stand-up fan, myself!! (breaths into mic, "whoo", "ahhh"), rocks
- VSTs: Steinway Grand Piano VST (Logic)
- Synthesis: ES P - a subtractive synthesis plugin, used to synthesize noise to create deep whooshes leading to impacts, and bassy transients with low ASDR
- Valhalla Shimmer: a special shimmery reverb used to add a lot of dustiness, shimmer, and etherealness to the magic of the scene
- ChromaVerb: basic reverb that I used primarily to make foley (specifically: glass tapping) less dry
- Ringshifter + Mobius Filter: used the frequency modulation to add movement and energy to all layers
- Echo: used primarily to add a little more tail to transients and make impacts a little more interesting
- Pitch shifter: pitched samples up/down for a variety of uses, including - filling out the frequency spectrum, having sounds match the coloring/brightness of the magic, and having sounds match the mood
- Channel EQ: often used to filter out frequencies, making room for highs, lows, or mids to shine in different sections
- BitterSweet: a transient designer that I used to soften or boost attacks of sounds, especially impacts
- Chorus: additional modulation used primarily for the haunted spirit voice to help create the effect that multiple voices are sounding at once, and to help fill out the voices and keep them from sounding dry
- Convology XT: convoluted reverb used primarily for the haunted spirit voice to make the voice feel echo-y, bring it into the space of the tomb, and make it feel like it's surrounding Noctis
Final thoughts
There’s probably a bit more I could do with this redesign, but any changes would be fairly small, and I’m quite ready to move on to other WIPs and start new projects. As sad as I am to say goodbye to my work on this, I want to keep moving forward. I’m super happy and proud with my work on this though :’)
I’m also quite proud of how far I’ve come with sound design, and how much it shows in this FFXV redesign. I’m becoming much better at building up to huge impactful moments and coming away from them, reaching for atypical source sounds, designing too big and taking away (rather than designing too little and having to keep adding, which is harder), integrating some synthesis and music into my designs, and just overall telling a story through sound. All things that weren’t really present in my sound design toolbelt just a few months ago. Still going to keep working hard to go farther, but I’m content with the progress I’ve made.
& that’s all I have for today! Thank you so much for reading, and be well!