Richter
How do you make an earthquake with a handheld recorder and free synth plugins?
The Concept
Student short film about an earthquake. The brief came with one constraint: no commercial sample libraries. If a sound appears in this film, I either recorded it or synthesized it from nothing.
That meant walking around campus with a Zoom H6, recording footsteps on wood, concrete, and carpet. Slamming doors. Crinkling paper. Dragging cloth across surfaces. Anything that could become "building falling apart" later in the edit.
The earthquake itself? Layers of synth drones from Vital and ReaSynth pitched way down, with granular-stretched foley on top. Pure low-end rumble sounds fake. Adding physical texture - stretched door creaks, concrete scrapes - makes the shaking feel real. I also wrote a short orchestral cue, strings and brass, timed to the scene cuts.
Full film - all sound from scratch, no commercial libraries
Approach
Field Recording
If I didn't record it, it didn't exist. Room tones, ambiences, surface textures - all Zoom H6 in the field. The hardest thing to find was a convincing "ceiling cracking" sound. Ended up stomping on a dry wooden pallet.
Synthesis
All free plugins - Vital, ReaSynth, TAL Noisemaker. The earthquake rumble is Vital with the pitch dropped to near-subsonic range. The alarm is pure synthesis, and getting it to sound urgent without being annoying took way more attempts than I expected.
Foley
Three surface types for footsteps alone, plus doors, paper, cloth. Recorded to Cubase, then granular-stretched the same recordings for the earthquake scenes. A normal door close, time-stretched 800%, suddenly sounds like a building tearing itself apart.
Mix
The quake rumble ate the dialogue. Every single test screening, nobody could hear the actors. I carved a pocket around 2-4kHz with EQ automation and added sidechain ducking so the rumble dips whenever someone speaks. A full day of Reaper automation to get the balance right. The rumble had to feel heavy without burying the dialogue.