Richter
Earthquake short-film sound design with no commercial libraries: Zoom H6 recordings, free synths, and dialogue-safe rumble.
No-Library Earthquake Sound Design
Student short film about an earthquake. The brief came with one constraint: no commercial sample libraries. The sound effects came from my own recordings or synthesis.
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 sound design: original recordings, synthesis, and no commercial libraries
Audio notes
No-Library Earthquake Sound Design. 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.
Field Recording, Synthesis, and Dialogue Mix
Field Recording
For foley and ambiences, I only used material I recorded on the Zoom H6. Room tones, ambiences, surface textures - all captured 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, tuned so it feels urgent without masking dialogue or wearing out the listener.
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 in test playback, so the actors were hard to understand. 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 got the balance to a place where the rumble still felt heavy without burying the dialogue.