What sound effect did you have to spend the most time getting just right? What's your white whale?

The Banu Defender. Yeah, that took quite a while.

What about it?

Well, because we've never made a Banu ship before, and there was nothing to go on, there was no previous work to look at and go, all right, that's the ballpark of what this one should sound like. I had to kind of come up with it from scratch.

We did a design spec briefly, like tribal, tubular, all that kind of stuff, proper alien. Apart from the Vanduul stuff, it's proper alien. It's not normal thrusters, it's not human tech, it's proper alien. You did a great job. There was one moving part, wasn't there, that had a clunk in it, and that sticks out because it's not alien enough.

You're like, oh no. And I was just like, one week of terror of being like, am I a good sound designer? Can I do this? What am I doing? Am I a fraud? And then you finally kind of get there. You're really happy with it.

How do you make something that's never been made before? What do you reference that has no reference? Sometimes the hardest thing is the complete unknown.

Yes. There's a great phrase that I always refer back to. If you get given a completely clean slate, you can do anything you want, it's being paralyzed by the possibility of infinity. So if you sit there, blue-sky thing, you can do anything you want, you go, well, where do I start? Where do I begin? But if you're given some restrictions, you can find creativity in there. When I first joined the company, the audio director at the time was like, right, we've got this mobiGlas system and we need a full UI suite. And with UI stuff, it's like a language, like positive, negative, good, bad, happy, sad kind of stuff, and tracking movement. And I was like, man, I suck at UI. Don't make me do it. It's like, well, that's exactly why you should do it. And I was like, right. So I was playing with loads of synths and making it sound all sci-fi and swishy and stuff. I was like, no, that sucks. And it was called mobiGlas, so I thought I was well clever and got loads of sample libraries of glass breaking, cracking, screeching, all that kind of stuff. And so I'm going to use this as my source, and only that, to generate all my sound effects for the mobiGlas. And I got some really good results for the first pass and stuff. And I took it to the audio director, and it was like, yeah, that's great. You've got all these frequencies in there that you don't need for UI. I'm like, okay then. Back to it again. I spent probably about two weeks solid just doing this UI system. But it turned out all right.

There's a lot of value in doing it. That's what I did for the Banu Defender. When I realized I was struggling, I just kind of sat and found a bunch of sounds that I thought were all in the same ballpark, the same kind of aesthetic, and then put them in a folder and went, right, I've got to do this just with these. The odd exception.

So actually, when you're given a fairly wide open task, the thing that worked best for you was actually to constrain yourself.