He's Really Feeling It

I'm planning to use the footage from 11 seconds to 41 seconds (cutting to the forest scenery to the "Shulk forsees a fight" screen). I'm planning to do something similar to the trailer itself, where at the beginning it starts with tranquil foresty music and then transitions into like evil overlord music as Bowser shows up, and then end with something heroic as Shulk jumps out and attacks him. If possible, I'd like to find sound clips of his two lines "BACKSLASH!" and "I'm really feeling it." without background music so I can add them back in once I mute the sound and add in my sound effects because I think they're pretty cool and they're basically his catchphrases (disclaimer: haven't played his game, I only know him from Smash).

EDIT: So apparently this needs to be at least 50 seconds, so I'm going to extend it to end at 1:07, which covers Shulk's fight with Link and Marth. Immediately after his pose he sees a vision of the future, so what I'm thinking about doing is starting the battle theme there but adding some effects to it for those few seconds to indicate its the future. Then when it jumps back to the present I'm going to play the same thing but normally and keep going with it. The theme itself I think is going to be somewhat fast and not too over the top because its only three people fighting not like armies or anything. As the fight progresses I'm going to add in sound effects for the slashes and clangs because I think they're nice effects, and then transition to the ending when Shulk jumps away at around the 58 second mark. During the fight I'm either going to keep the theme quiet so it doesn't overshadow the action or start quiet and build as the fight becomes more intense, I'll have to see how it turns out. For the ending I'm thinking about a kind of eighth note building run (kind of like the beginning of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA_dMjRSSLk) continues through his line "Now its show time," and peaks right before his final line "This is the Monado's power!" where I'll cut out dramatically for that line and finally end with a short hit or couple of hits.

Final Thoughts:

Objective: My objective for this project is to recreate Shulk authentically in his trailer while adding my own take on the background music and sound effects to create my own version of the trailer. I will locate the sound clips from Shulk's original game, Xenoblade Chronicles, and insert them to give Shulk some character, because I think only sound effects and music won't capture everything.

Process: So I started by ripping the Youtube video, downloading it and importing it into Logic. The first thing I did was compose the short theme that played while Bowser was running across the field. I wanted a short, low brassy theme that sounded like an evil overlord was showing up with the bum-bums in a minor key. I added birds in front to set the scenery afterwards and so there would be sound in the seconds before Bowser shows up and birds afterwards for humor when he stops and sees the butterfly. His stop and roar were both Logic sound effects added in.

Shulk's sword charging and powering up were generated by combining a Logic sound effect for electric noise with an electronic sounding synthesizer that came in when his sword turns on after half a second or so. Cutting back to Bowser I chose to remove the electric effects and go with only birds because that's what he was hearing. Also throughout this every time Bowser steps a bass drum hit happens which was added late in the process because it sounded really weird when Bowser was running and you couldn't hear anything.

For Shulk's sneak attack there are a few things going on. I've got the actual sound clip of him yelling "BACKSLASH" from Xenoblade combined with brass runs that build as he jumps and attacks Bowser. Once Bowser flies away, it turns into more of a fanfare as he turns his sword off, stands up, says his line "I'm really feeling it" and poses. The little sound when the sword turns off is from the same synthesizer as before when it turned on. The woosh and zap that played when Bowser got hit were both Logic sound effects, which was really lucky because I think they fit really well. The thump where the "Shulk forsees a fight" screen pops up is also a Logic effect, adding impact to the reveal.

Moving into the next section Shulk immediately thinks "a vision" even though his mouth isn't moving to let the audience know what's going on, because the next few seconds can be confusing if one didn't know who Shulk was ahead of time. He sees a vision a few seconds into the future where he is attacked and flies away. There is a quiet transition between the vision and reality and in the vision the battle theme is started by a string section. It is quiet to represent the fact that it isn't reality and minor because Shulk loses. The slash and launch effects are from Logic and the scream is from Xenoblade.

It shifts back to reality and the battle theme switches into the relative major key and keeps going along. The theme builds in both volume and register as the action gets more and more intense in the fight. Because the trailer focuses on Shulk, I'm only including sound effects from him leaving Marth and Link silent. There are tons of sword clashes and grunts flying around, the sword effects are all from Logic and all of Shulk's grunts (I think there were 3-4 different ones) are from Xenoblade. I think I did a reasonably good job of synchronizing the clashes with the action and Shulk's grunts were just added in places that I thought would make sense to have them. As the sword fight ends and Shulk jumps away I transition back into brass because I wanted to end with a brass and that seemed to be a good transition point. The brass section has a quick run and a slower ascending line going on simultaneously to build up to Shulk's final lines, where they stop for his first line "Not gonna work" and then go for a final sting between that and his second line "This is the monado's power" where the video ends. The beeps as the Asian characters flash on the sword are the same synthesizer I used to signal the monado turning on and off before.

Critical Reflection: I have mixed feelings about this video. I am very pleased with the sound effects used, Logic had a ton to choose from and between those and the Xenoblade sound clips I thought I created something pretty authentic sounding. They fit very well and I spent a non-trivial amount of time synchronizing everything until I thought it was close to perfect (if a sword  sound happens with no sword hit it really hinders the piece, for example). Musically, I have a few problems with this, the music doesn't convey exactly what I want it to because I was somewhat limited in my own abilities to compose and perform on the Logic keyboard. I think the limited music I've created though does its job, so I'm satisfied with it even though I think it could be a little better.

If I saw this at the beginning of the semester I would have been very impressed though, at the start of the semester I had no skills in sound mixing or video editing, I had never done it before, so seeing this would have been pretty cool. I can see that obviously I'm a lot more critical now because we've spent the semester learning about criticism and how to make something using these tools so I'm more focused on the content and presentation rather than "oh that's pretty cool."