Telltale’s Borderlands – Episode 1 Intro

Telltale make some really captivating games that I come back to quite often, and my favorite among them has always been their Borderlands spin-off. The game was released episodically with each episode having its own intro, and it’s still a treat to see how unique each of them are. I wanted to redesign the sound for the intro of episode 1, but still keep the original choice of music because of how iconic it is.

My sound design process

• Instead of producing the sound completely linearly, I wanted to make it more interactive like you would when designing sound for games. To do this, I broke every action into pieces and designed each sound effect individually in FL Studio, to later bounce into the full Pro Tools session.
• In terms of ambience, I wanted to capture the desolate feeling of the barren wasteland, designing a mix of desert ambience layers, wind gusts, and rustling pebbles.
• For the car, I found a good Audi Q5 sample library on Soundly, which I mixed with various recordings of cars drifting and driving on gravel to match the surfaces of the enviroment.

My editing and mixing process

• The video can basically be divided into two chapters – before the car fireballs into the ground, and after. The first chapter is more grounded and gritty with the sound effects being in focus, while the second half is more comedic and feel-good with the music blasting away.
• To capture this contrast, I opted to make the music part of the world initially, worldizing it to sound like it’s being played from a speaker in the world, and then panning it slightly when the radio comes into view. But as soon as the car rockets into the ground, the music is turned up, and the worldizing goes away.