The winners and runners up of the contest were announced last week on a livestream on Airwiggles: a social platform for audio designers. Let’s take a look at the winning entries:
Here are the prizes:
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We’ve ventured to obscure boutiques, prop houses and vintage shops to capture mechanical contraptions from around the world. Ranging from bizarre creations, to steampunk gadgetry, gizmos and machines, GEARBOX clocks in at over 10 GB of high definition, precision mastered sounds spanning across 2987 construction kit sounds and 584 designed sounds.
GEARBOX equips Sound Designers with a literal toolbox of mechanical gadgetry. Ranging from tiny to huge, GEARBOX‘s machines and gizmos provide coverage for interacts, mechanism, machine or device in your scene or game.
INTRODUCING BUILDING BLOCKS
In addition to CONSTRUCTION KIT and DESIGNED SOUND content, GEARBOX features BUILDING BLOCKS. This category of sound consists of designed phrases and oneshots utilized for our designed machinery, empowering Sound Designers with maximum flexibility when trying to get that particular phrase from an existing DESIGNED SOUND. GEARBOX features over 468 BUILDING BLOCKS ranging from levers, hits, grinds, snaps, and more.
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Award 1: The Creativity Award
Runner ups: Petter Karlsten, Katharina Bär, KVBA
Sound designer Damian Pace took the first award with an incredibly dense soundscape full of details. For added context: contest participants were given over 1gb of sound effects to use in order to design sounds for this clip, including some demos of various A Sound Effect sound libraries, sound effects provided by Airwiggles founders Lewis Thompson and Greg Lester, and some free samples provided by the Airwiggles community. There were hundreds of wacky sound effects provided and most sound designers only used a small portion of them: but Damian set themselves a challenge to use every sound effect exactly once.
“I decided to use every sound provided (all 187 of them)! This forced me to use sounds I wouldn’t normally have picked for this sort of video, which I think resulted in a nice big cinematic sound, while giving the individual grapes character and helping bring them to life.” – Damian Pace
This self-imposed limitation must have been very difficult to pull off without the clip sounding like an incredible mess of eclectic sounds: however, we think Damian absolutely aced the challenge and managed to create something clean and coherent with lots of interesting, subtle textures that you only notice upon listening to the clip multiple times. We think this was a fantastic submission and is a perfect example of how limitation breeds creativity. Congratulations to Damian!
Award 2: The Production Award:
Runner ups: Ben Rohletter, Mackubin Owens, Jakub Rehor
Audio Designer Sam Merryweather blew us away with his entry. Sam elevated the clip to the next level with some incredible cinematic production: transforming the sound effects provided in weird and wonderful ways to create completely unique tones and textures. In order to expand the amount of source material available to him, Sam generated tonnes of new sound effects by running the source material through Granulator II inside Ableton, which gave him a whole bank of fun new sounds to play with.
“Most of these created textures were used as audio [in the session], but some were imported into Phase Plant samplers and further manipulated. One example use case was to create a rattling ball style effect from a low version of the grain-resampled rain, which is a key layer in the grape detaching section.” – Sam Merryweather
Finally, Sam ended the clip with some awesome musical cinematic sound effects which formed an epic sounding synth cadence, perfectly rounding off the video clip. We think Sam managed to use creative production techniques to create a bank of interesting source material that really helped him stand out of the crowd. Congratulations to Sam!
Award 3: The Recordist Award:
Runner ups: Julian Ferreira da Silva, Davide Laurito, Mark Berg
Whilst we provided all entrants with 1gb+ of sound effects they can use in their redesigns, we also allowed people to record and create their own sound effects and synth patches in order to enhance the audio. Pablo Velasco took this to the next level: with almost every single sound you hear being something they recorded or synthesized themselves. Pablo embarked on a field recording trip to the mountains, and took some creative recordings of water splashing and fruits being squished at home.
“I went to a mountain with my H1n to record the sounds of the foliage and rustling leaves” – Pablo Velasco
They then supplemented this with some deep, cinematic synth patches that they designed with TAL-U-No-LX which helped give the clip some direction. Whilst we were very impressed at the quantity of Pablo’s recording efforts: we also think that the quality of these self-made sounds was fantastic and fitted the clip perfectly: and the breakdown video Pablo included at the end was the cherry on top. Congratulations Pablo!
Award 4: The Community Award:
Runner ups: Scott VR, Heli Linnus, Ted Hogeman
Airwiggles is all about the tight-knit audio community! We really wanted our contest participants to have fun, share knowledge, give feedback, and learn from each other – rather than to keep their cards close to their chest in order to win. We had so many Airwiggles users actively participating in the community and helping each other which was awesome to see: but Andrea Carsenzuola really went all out!
“The whole idea of this design was to make it seem bigger than what it actually is, so I tried to get very cinematic and almost over the top (by making big whooshes, deep impacts, and playing around with the stereo field)” – Andrea Carsenzuola
Firstly, Andrea livestreamed their entire contest entry on Twitch for other participants to tune into and learn from. They then also created a breakdown video afterwards showing off their session and how they created certain sounds: complete with a text-to-speech robot assistant narrating for us! Andrea put in a tonne of effort knowledge-sharing for the sound design community and for that reason we have awarded them with the Community Award! Congratulations!
Award 5: The Airwiggles Award:
Runner ups: Cecilia Garciá, Gibson Gillet-Behrens, Kieran Blackstone
The Airwiggles Award simply went to our personal favourite clip: and that was designed by audio engineer Jade Dickey! Jade’s focus was on making the grapes sound fresh: one of the ways they did this was by processing a provided sample of some crackling pumpkin seeds to sound like tiny water droplets.
“I really wanted to focus on making the grapes sound “fresh” via highlighting the sound of the water beads as the grapes are twisting and emphasizing the wave sounds when all the grapes are colliding” – Jade Dickey
We felt this entry nailed the story-telling aspect of the clip. It’s an advert for some form of grape drink, and Jade’s entry sounded smooth, fresh, juicy, tasty: and ultimately, it left us wanting to eat grapes! In our opinion, if this advert was to actually be televised, this is the audio that would be chosen to help sell the grape-based drink. All 153 entries to the contest sounded fantastic, and it was very hard going through them all and picking the winners: however, Jade’s entry stood out to us immediately, and deservedly went on to win. Congratulations to Jade Dickey!
That wraps up the Airwiggles x A Sound Effect Sound Design Contest. Thank you again to all 153 participants: we can’t believe the amount of people who entered! If you haven’t already, make sure to sign up to Airwiggles.com to stay up to date with any future contests and events made for the audio community.
Congratulations again to all of our winners!
– Lewis, Greg, and Asbjoern
