sound design is the cheapest and easiest way to improve the production value and quality of your films and in this video i'm going to be walking you through sound designing a film trailer and showing off my favorite techniques and tricks that i've learned from my years as a professional editor we're going to be working with the trailer for my short film will the machine and here's a quick taste of what we're going to end up with at the end of this video let's go it's again late pretty cool now if you saw my video on recording cinematic audio you know that getting great audio starts on set but once you're off set and in post you can greatly enhance that audio and the storytelling in your film with sound design and that's the main difference between sound design versus sound mixing or dialogue cleanup those latter two involve a lot more choices that are just objectively right or wrong whereas sound design involves a lot of creative storytelling choices to show you what i mean here's a quick example from my new short film last laugh inc now let's watch it first with just naturalistic normal sound design now let's see the sound design that i landed on for the final film [Music] so as you can see i really went over the top by adding all these heightening cinematic sounds to the beginning of the film and what i think that's doing is making that intro more cinematic more mysterious more engaging but as the film goes on and we realize that that opening was tongue-in-cheek and the film doesn't deliver what was kind of promised with that opening that choice ends up mirroring the story and the tone of the rest of the film and that's storytelling through sound design now let's get started on this trailer now i'm using premiere but it doesn't matter if you're using final cut or vegas or avid or resolve whatever the techniques and effects that i'm going to be using are all going to be the same if you're using something more basic like imovie you might not have some of these effects but the principles will still apply and as you can see i've got the will the machine trailer here which i've slightly re-edited just to show off a few specific sound design techniques and i've left in some production audio that we'll be building our sound effects and sound design around so having some kind of problem just some dialogue sounds good the rest we're going to build so let's start at the beginning we got this big drone shot here first thing i would do here would be to add some ambience maybe some wind maybe some distant birds chirping distant water i'm going to pull up soundly and let's look for some wind sounds biggest tool i'll be using today is soundly which is where i'll be sourcing all my sound effects and let me tell you as a professional editor for years i've used a ton of different sound effects packs sound effects subscriptions services and soundly is just by far the best one i can literally sound design a piece twice as fast using soundly versus other services if you go to getsoundlead.com they have a free trial where it's fully functional you just have a much smaller library of sound effects to work with but it's only 15 bucks a month cancel whenever you want and the great thing with soundly is i can grab any part of this sound effect i want i just wanted this 10 seconds right here i could just grab that 25 seconds just grab it pull it directly into premiere and look at this save files drag into premiere to a folder that is relative to the current project directory basically every time i pull a sound effect into this project it goes exactly to the correct folder on my finder where i keep my sound effects assuming you're using the same folder structure for all your projects which you should if i go to reveal in finder look it is in the sound effects folder for sound design tutorial amazing now what i would like to do is actually take this part where the wind picks up for as the camera flies in on that second drone shot so let's see if we can just move this over i don't need the wind over the football game much so i'll just cut it there i'll blend these two parts together with a little cross dissolve you want your audio to flow like a river you don't want it to just have sudden starts and stops for the most part i pretty much always do just a quick cross dissolve at the beginning and end or in between audio clips just smooths out any distracting differences in the sound quality and let's push this over i don't want it to pick up until we do the speed ramp yeah it's about right here's the difference between doing a keyframe versus a cross dissolve on the audio like this if i were to keyframe out the audio similar right but now let's say i want to add an effect to it like a studio reverb reverb is an effect that i use all the time which basically gives it an echoey type sound let's say i go down to the great hall preset which is a good default if you want a very significant reverb the reverb effect continues over this part that i've keyframed down to silence if i were to use the reverb and just have the clip end with the crossfade right there the reverb effect will go down with this crossfade effect into silence and it'll lend too quick and that's no fun so we're going to keep the keyframe and it's got a nice little ring out of reverb at the end there love that now we want some more ambience though let's get some birds chirping and another great thing about soundly they have a pretty extensive catalog the stuff that they don't have in their own uh catalog which you'll see here soundly pro sounds they also have an integration with freesound.org and it will take all of the free to use creative commons sounds from free sounds and it just throws them right here in their library so i can grab the bird sounds from here good stuff know what i'm going to add a little reverb to it too i'm going to copy and paste it onto here and find some river sounds so let's say i use this one it sounds a little too close to my liking so i'm gonna put some effects on it to make it sound like it's further away i'm gonna solo this so i can hear what i'm doing first thing is to make it less loud but i've just added a low pass low pass it's going to let all of the sound that is below a certain frequency end so all of your low bassy sounds get to pass through to your ears there's also a high pass which is going to let high pitched frequencies pass through your ears but i use these all of the time i think in addition to the low pass it needs some reverb oh yeah it's very subtle we're building this world sound obviously the crowd cheering here and then we've got some boom boom boom these quick stills actually i i've favorited these sounds because i use them so much sound design favorites these camera flashes use them all the time what i tend to do when there's repeated sounds like this in quick succession is make them get progressively louder or sometimes i'll even speed up and slow down the clips as they go so that the sound is just slightly different so i'll do a combination of that now so let's get some football crowd sounds in here and here's where that reverb is really going to come in handy so let's get that studio reverb back on let's go to great hall and i'm going to really amp this up let's see how this is looking [Applause] yeah i would like to build that up a little more all right so one thing i'm realizing now is it's nice that we have this ambience but when this comes up i want that to hit i want to know that we're watching a trailer here and that's beautiful so you might not hear this if you're on a phone but this is a very bassy just kind of drop i think we're going to find some kind of a riser or a swell the riser is basically just a sound that continuously rises and usually cuts off pretty quick swells the same thing but it usually has a come down that's way too peaceful that's kind of cool a little unnerving almost i want it to peak right around where we transition into the archival okay maybe i'll try something else on top of that though i like that if you find one good sound that's great but you can usually make your sound design much more impactful and unique by layering other sounds on top of it it just sounds richer fuller more unique i watch things all the time where i'm like oh i've used that sound effect oh i have that library but if you layer sounds on top of each other it kind of disguises them makes them unique i'm starting to dig it maybe we'll do some slow-motion breaths and we have this moment here where this tree is passing so this is a moment where sound design can actually improve the edit because i'm not a huge fan of that cut so if i put a whoosh there it might sell the cut and justify it so we want kind of a low whooshing sound and wishes are the easiest sound to overuse i'm actually pretty guilty of this anytime something's flying in or out or moving yeah that is about right and let's also put some reverb on it once again you know i love that reverb this is a shot of a confederate statue i want to make this moment a little ominous what i often use in this kind of moment is a drone and a drone is just any kind of consistent bed that's beneath all of your audio you can have a sinister drone you can have an ethereal drone you can have lots of different moods that are very subtly pushing the viewer in a certain way so i kind of like this one it's a little airy and as far as keeping this timeline organized i go a little crazy at first and i usually clean it up later but it's better to put long bits of ambience uh music especially near the bottom of your track layers dialogue production audio goes near the top and then regular sound effects in the middle [Music] all right so what i've done is added some more layering to this more ominous sounds i put some walla which is just crowd sounds that you can't really make out just sounds like murmuring so i started that walla over the previous shot just to lead us and build momentum to the next mini scene here but i want to do something new with this trailer i'm going to take this line you know you can talk now you can talk to me right and we're going to do something called delay on this delay say analog delay settings take a preset like canyon echoes here's what that's going to do to the audio you know you can talk to you know you can talk to you so that's a very clear echoing compared to reverb which just kind of makes everything mashed potato and you can obviously customize everything so i want it to be a little slower than that so let's bring it up to like 9.75 so we have a lot of work to do right here but we're gonna have some fun with it obviously some kind of rubber stretching sound effect would make sense here but since the short film's called will the machine this guy's supposed to be a machine might be nice to have something metallic as he does that movement [Music] you know what let's just throw this in and put some reverb on and see what that does reverb is basically salt if you put it on anything it'll taste better let's see what that does having some kind of problem yeah that's fine now we got this moment these are fun for sound design this is called a stutter so we could do some kind of stutter sound effect this one is going to work great it's a little too high pitched a little too fast fix both of those and one fell swoop just by slowing it down i still want it to be lower pitch so i'm going to do a pitch shifter effect which allows us to directly change how high or low pitched it sounds so i'm going to bring it down kind of problem [Music] and then for the kick we're gonna put an impact there that's fun problem [Music] yeah baby that felt good okay so i've layered some more sounds in once again little metal shang under the glass sound straight into getting like that metal hit when he catches the bar because originally it was just that's not hardcore enough we won like it's catching a truck and getting late i've had some other sounds in here too let's just watch the entire thing [Applause] [Music] she you know you can talk to me right you know you can talk to me man if you're having some kind of problem let's go again it's getting late i think it turned out pretty good i'm i'm gonna take off the headphones i'm happy with that i hope you learned something here and i want to be honest this is not the first time that i've sound designed this thing this is the second time attempting record if you want to follow along the full 90 minutes of me putting it together for the first time where i talk through all of my choices and figure it out in real time i now have a new place where i can put long-form in-depth videos that's right i'm starting a patreon for this channel where you'll be able to learn faster with exclusive weekly videos even one-on-one consultations with me and you'll be supporting this channel at the same time so check the link in the description i really want to make this the best channel for filmmakers who want to improve their storytelling no matter what their budget is and with your support i really think that i can get there also i got pretty drunk in the patreon tutorial so you're not going to want to miss that thanks for watching