HITMAN 3 – Announcement Trailer

Ever since Absolution’s release in 2012, the HITMAN series quickly became a favorite of mine. The amount of freedom and creativity these games give the player in how they want to approach their objective is something is incredibly fun. These huge, intricate levels with deep interactivity (especially with the Mission Stories) provide so much replayability, and I love exploring every corner of them while figuring out a plan.

I picked this trailer without having watched it since it was published, removed the original audio, and began forming my own vision of how it would sound while sticking to HITMAN’s themes – tension, intrigue, and stealth. For this trailer, it felt like the sound effects and music would go hand in hand, so I also produced some suspenseful, modern, electronic music that fits the style of the games.

My sound design process

• Most of the raw samples come from Soundly’s sample library which I’ve then used to design more unique effects. For example, the footsteps consist of three layers – shoes, cloth foley, and ground surface, while the knockout punches consist of whooshes, deep subs, punches, and weapon foley.
• I tried to approach the sound design in a more interactive way, like you would in games, by designing each sound effect separately and creating multiple variations.
• For both sound design and music production, I use FL Studio.

My music production process

• The music is the frontrunner of this trailer, and it made sense to me that the trailer’s original music would have been synced for beats to hit on certain actions in the video. I began experimenting on my keyboard while watching the muted video, and narrowed the tempo down to 120 BPM.
• With the visuals in mind, I envisioned the music to be very tense and aggressive – almost thriller horror-like. Using Omnisphere, I constructed this growling bass that I thought would be an excellent lead while a pulsing bass was laying a suspenseful rhythm in the background.
• To leave space for the visuals and sound effects to tell a story, the music starts out rather minimalistic, and then slowly builds up in intensity as the goons are being taken out.
• To really match the trailer’s visuals, I also mapped out important events with time markers in my music session, to see at exactly which point in the music a goon is knocked out, when the build-up begins, or when the title screen plays. This gave me a better overview to bring in new instruments accordingly.
• Later in the process, I went back to the music with the feeling that it was missing percussive elements, but I wasn’t happy with any of the percussion that I tried. Eventually I thought, why not do something simple – like adding white noise in place of a drum snare to almost simulate a loss of signal in the dense forest? I think that part worked out very nicely.

My editing and mixing process

• While producing the sound and music, I began structuring a session in Pro Tools with time markers, and mapping out positions of every “event” in the video.
• Many of the sounds are routed through a reverb bus to match the acoustics of the forest, and I use automation on both panning and volume throughout the entire video to follow the directionality of the characters on screen.
• Lastly, I wanted the mix to be rather cinematic and impactful, with almost a brickwall limiting mindset at certain points, while still ducking enough to leave space for the music to build at the end.

Behind the scenes of the project