‘HESAPIA’ is a short film series created by visual artist Eunjo Lee. Lee forms detailed dystopian worlds in Unreal Engine, in which she weaves philosophical and religious narratives about rebirth, self realisation, and sorrow.
The sound design is a merger of environment and score. Through the transducing of metal beams and the use of convolution reverbs, every element of the score has a relation to the materials prevalent in the environment.
The intro for HESAPIA was created using two softwares, ‘Sound Particles’ and ‘Envy’. I began by recording myself saying each phoneme individually, ‘He’ ‘Sa’ ‘Pi’ ‘A’. After recording about 5 variations for each phoneme, I inputed these recordings to Sound Particles. Using the Immersive fire particle movement preset, I created a slowly growing storm of these phonemes.
I then took that recording and used it as the texture in the software ‘Envy’. The input was each individual phoneme in order, creating the word. Using Envy’s gating, I shaped the storm of phonemes into the original word.
‘Welcome to Eden’ contains an experimentation in convolution reverb and impulse responses. I inputted a long metal scrape as the impulse response in a convolution reverb applied to a cello recording, this gave the cello a metallic timbre.
Sandstone Temple
The second half of HESAPIA is set in a thunderous dessert, with a large temple constructed with sandstone and copper pipes. The majority of the score was created with these materials, sand, stone tiles and copper piping. I recorded continuous sound from each material, then extracted a tuned note from each recording using EQ and sometimes Melodyne. These tuned notes were then transferred to a sampler, creating playable instruments made from the material.
I found that when slowed to create a bass synth, the tile on tile combination created interesting textures and rhythms. Here’s an example of how that instrument was played:
Here’s an example of a higher frequency synth from the same sample:
The percussion was primarily build from recordings and samples of sand, gears, heartbeats and a bass drum. Here’s an example of the sand and gears:
The lead instrument of the score is a synth created through sampling my voice, minimal manipulation to maintain an eerie organic sound. It was paired with a lower bit crushed vocal synth to give it more grit and allow it to cut through the mix more.
Reverb- I think it’s worth mentioning that I made a conscious decision to only use convolution reverbs of churches and cathedrals, in order to give the score a feeling of religious gravity to suit the narrative themes.