For this trailer I handled both music and sound design. The brief was simple: make it feel violent, heavy, and uncomfortably real. Instead of using big libraries or polished effects, I went the opposite way. I recorded a pile of raw sounds around the studio: folkloric instruments that weren’t tuned right, wooden boxes, dry branches, metal scrapes, even scissors opening and closing. Then I pushed everything through distortion, saturation, pitch shifting, and a lot of Valhalla. Those plugins were basically living on every channel.
The drums weren’t meant to sound clean or heroic. They needed to feel like someone is marching toward a fight they’re not sure they’ll survive. I layered them with deep booms and short, angry hits, almost like the ground was shaking under footsteps. For the vocal textures, I used my own voice and some processed chants. Nothing fancy, just low-tech sounds that turned into something tense and primal once they were mangled.
It was messy at times. I broke more than one stick trying to get the right snap out of a dry branch. But in the end the trailer sounded brutal, and that’s exactly what it needed to be. A world of revenge, steel, and cold weather, all built from sounds that weren’t supposed to fit together, but somehow did.
