As a musician and  Foley artist one of the standout movies in my mind is Transformers. Put aside the stunning visual effects this movie really packs a  punch in sound design. That said, I thought it would be fun to do a little case study and point out some observations about the sound engineering and Foley effects in the movie. We've posted the trailer for the new movie to give you a base of reference.  After you watch the trailer, you can read the process I went through to create similiar sounds. 

I've made the video of my final product available below.  You can then read about the process I went through to create the sounds.

It's safe to say that the transforming sounds are the films signature sound effect.  With this in mind, I popped in the dvd and skipped foward to the scene where Optimus prime transforms for the very first time.  I listened to it over and over again with my eyes closed and took some notes.  First of all, I jotted down different sound I thought I recognized.  The sound of servos, hyrdraulic lifts, chains clanking, metal clicking on metal, etc.  I then went into our existing library and pulled those kind of sounds into my project, in particular, anything metallic sounding which I could possibly tweak to fit.  I was still lacking a good forklift sound, but my buddy John Daley helped me with that.  After accumlating all the sounds, I placed them in various combinations until I had something that sounded like a robot transforming (I did this to the simple stop motion film I had made the night previous using my digital photo camera).  I pitch changed, in particular to make some of the gear or lift sounds a bit smaller as I was dealing with a toy version of Bumblebee and I felt that the sound size should match the visual size.  I tried to time some of the more obvious sounds to visual points in the transformation.  That being said, it was a fairly fun and easy process once I had accumulated and placed the sounds. 

Making the laser sound was quite a bit more complicated.  I was endeavoring to create it all in post.  I essentially took a nail impact sound, a sweeping sine wave, and a small toy car wheel spinning sound and blended them together.  I reversed the toy wheels spinning sound and added a metalizer modulation affect o it.  This served as the laser sort of powering up.  I placed the impact sound at the end of that and rolled off some of the highs and body.  I took the sine wave sweep and made a copy.  I then pitch changed one quite high, and reversed it.  This was the high part of the lazer sound.  I also inserted a tight reverb with reduced low and high freqs to give it some presence and light verb tail.  Lastly, I took the original sine wave sweep and pitch changed up, but not as high as the first.  I killed the mid and high freqs and also reversed this sound.  I matched up the timing, and rendered.  I've placed the transforming and laser sounds on our site for your use, and hopefully, this article has been useful in your quest to make your own kicking sounds.

Regards,

Cives