Cinema loves a helicopter scene. And this movie is fuelled by them. Redesigning the chopper sounds as it moved along with, towards and away from the camera, proved a challenge, a discovery and a joy for me.

Chopper components comprised of the blades (designed using a ‘Hard Detuned Saws’ Alchemy patch, set to an immediate attack, and minimal decay, sustain and release times to make the ‘thump’ sounds brief. An AutoFilter was then added at high frequency to make the same pitch(es) repeat endlessly.

Other chopper sounds include the motors, designed from a hoover engine at low-pitch, the smaller propellers and winds (made by spraying several aersols into a fast-moving fan), and the ‘Doppler whoosh’, as it moves towards and over the camera (its frequency/pitch decreases by modulating the cents, then semitones, of a pitch-shifter).

As with the chopper noises, the machine guns and their bullet ricochets were tricky to successfully implement into the soundscape. After slapping a phone book onto a hard surface and editing the recording, so only the hard, loud thump is audible, the noise was combined with a Test Oscilator ‘thump’ for the guns’ body, and the whoosh of a thin kendo stick for the bullets’ ricochet off of grass, walls and humans. Speaking of which… the blood splat was in fact a rapid pour of water from the tap.

General Olmedo’s telephone was made with a ‘Synthetic Tines’ Alchemy plugin, Arpeggiated to continuously alternate between the same two pitches, and the tinnitus one of the soldiers experiences as they are under fire from an ‘Intense Motion’ flanger reverb, effectively slowing the audio down with the film.