Sound Design & Foley

Brief

Sound Design Inside of Five Nights At Freddy's

I think the original Five Nights At Freddy's (FNAF) and its sequels are great examples of high-tier sound design, especially for when it was created. Not only does it immerse you in the gameplay, but it makes something that isn't real feel real. Animatronics and robots are being made in real life, but not ones as advanced as this, so I think Scott Cawthon got great sound effects to complement his incredible art.

In FNAF, there are many different sounds that have been used in an attempt to scare the player. [1] A lot of sounds in all games are both diegetic and non-diegetic. In FNAF, this is especially useful to enhance the horror experience that the players will get. Diegetic sounds are the use of audio that the in-game character would technically hear. This could be from a character's voice (Phone Guy in this case) or footsteps. However, there are also the non-diegetic sounds that the game plays to enhance our gameplay experience, but we wouldn't hear them as the character. This could be the background/boss music that adds to the intensity, as well as some audio cues that help us understand what is happening in games, which in real life wouldn't happen. [2] A big one that is used for lots of jump scares in FNAF, other games and lots of TV shows and films is known as a stinger, and is used to try and make you jump. I believe FNAF has a good mix of both, but they are all implemented really seamlessly to make it feel so natural, so as not to distract you from the core gameplay.

FNAF also includes some other sounds, one is the ones which could be considered harmful. That is because some sounds are there just to distract you and make other sounds more difficult to hear. A good example is the desk fan that you hear throughout the whole night. [3] These red herrings drown out some of the advantageous sounds that you rely on, such as the kitchen noises you hear if there's an animatronic in there. Additionally, you have ambience and vocals. Ambience usually plays constantly, just adding to the atmosphere in an attempt to always have the player intrigued and scared. Vaguely vocal sounds are usually when we hear something similar to human sounds, but they've been altered by speeding up the sound or reversing it, which makes for an unsettling, uncanny valley noise. In FNAF, this could be seen with the noises the animatronics make. Of course, then you also have the winning and losing sounds, which let you know how you've done.

[4] Unfortunately, Scott didn't appear to create any sounds himself, except possibly the Phone Guy calls. All of the sound effects and music were used from royalty-free audio websites, such as sounddogs and neosounds. Some small things may have been free or recorded by him, but the majority of the important sounds were bought.  [5] The jumpscare sound that we all know too well now is also known as XSCREAM, and it's from a scene in a 1981 science fiction horror film: Inseminoid. Scott just took this sound, applied some changes to it, and he had a great, bone-chilling jumpscare sound.

Overall, I still think this is an amazing game. Later games, such as FNAF Security Breach, have a lot more sound effects and probably had sound designers actually making them, but I can't seem to find anything about which ones were made and how they were, so I'll just have to assume. Either way, the original games still creep me out, which proves that they were implemented right.

References

[1] Sharples, J. (2022). Five Nights at Freddy’s was an indie horror game from 2014, created by Scott Cawthon. When released it was widely accepted as a scary game. [online] Linkedin.com. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/audio-design-five-nights-freddys-jake-sharples/.

[2] Emory.edu. (2024). The Sound Design Behind a Famous Horror Game – Intro to Film 2024. [online] Available at: https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/introtofilm2024/2024/12/06/the-sound-design-behind-a-famous-horror-game/ [Accessed 22 Sep. 2025].

[3] Coconote.app. (2024). Sound Design in Five Nights at Freddy’s | Coconote. [online] Available at: https://coconote.app/notes/94810b73-71d5-4e11-b66c-387eea59c407 [Accessed 22 Sep. 2025].

[4] reddit. (2016). How did Scott make music/sound fx for FNAF? [online] Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/fivenightsatfreddys/comments/4h7v4n/how_did_scott_make_musicsound_fx_for_fnaf/.

[5] to, C. (2024). FNAF Jumpscare Sound. [online] Soundeffects Wiki. Available at: https://soundeffects.fandom.com/wiki/FNAF_Jumpscare_Sound.

The Use of Sound in Red Dead Redemption 2

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game that is thoroughly praised for its impeccable sound design. From footsteps to gunshots, the team at Rockstar made all of the sounds so realistic. It immerses you so well, you may just forget that it isn't real. Overall, the sound seems to have little to no imperfections; however, if there was something, it would have to be the slight [1] lack of ambient sounds compared to the first Red Dead Redemption game. Although ambient sounds are extremely important, it's not that they didn't include any; it just seems that some people thought that the original game had a bit more impact in that regard. 

In Red Dead, it's not just the sound design that's great, but also how and when they're played. [2] Distance and depth of sounds provide the player with many more ways of subconsiously perceiving where sounds are coming from. This is clearly heard when you are standing around and hear wagons rolling over a certain type of road material, horses making horse noises in the distance, and other sounds from NPCs and more, constantly adding to the immersion. Moreover, not only can the footsteps represent what is being walked on, but the tone and echo give the player a valuable insight as to whether they are inside, outside, or somewhere in between.

References

[1] Reddit.com. (2025). Reddit - The heart of the internet. [online] Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddeadredemption/comments/p4hdq0/odd_question_but_how_does_rdr2s_sound_design/ [Accessed 29 Sep. 2025].
[2] Liang, L.-H. (2022). Red Dead Redemption 2’s Soundscape Made Me Sit At The Campfire And Just Listen. [online] TheGamer. Available at: https://www.thegamer.com/red-dead-redemption-2-soundscape-campfire-listen/.

Foley Examples

A great example of some interesting Foley usage in a film would be in E.T., with regard to how the alien moves around. In the creation of the film, apparently the producer wanted E.T. to sound "liquidy and friendly", and after a bit of searching around for a good sound, they found that liver was a good food item to record. A little later, a foley artist had ordered jelly, but realised that it also had potential for being a sound. So, they made up a large batch at home, recorded some sounds, edited them all together, and they have some great movement audio for the Extra-Terrestrial alien. I can't easily find any other examples of jelly and/or liver being used, so I assume it isn't the most common item to use, especially when every sound is very specific, and foley artists use a large variety of items to create said sounds.

Another awesome example of the creation of sound effects with Foley is in God of War. In that game, there is mainly one woman who does the foley audio for PlayStation's massive game. In this room, she has a large assortment of various items, from mud and moss to swords and a car door. Because she's always there and has spent so much time on lots of projects, she can probably find something perfect for a sound quite quickly. For a game like God of War, there was always going to be a lot of sound effects, but I think it's really cool finding out the origin of some. For example, a breaking bones sound effect is made by crushing a pistol holster with dry pasta inside. Another is when a character is sliding down a collapsing balcony, the audio is made by scraping wooden planks with leather and metal. They're all very strange and interesting techniques, but they work quite well. After this, I also think that pretty much every sound effect is going to be made different. There's probably a lot of a sounds that foley artists have found, and these just happen to be the best for them at the time, but it doesn't mean there isn't more.

Adding Sound to a Trailer

For the next part of the sound design and foley assignment, we were tasked with choosing a game trailer that was provided to us and remaking the sound portion of it. We need a minimum of 60 seconds, which gave me a nice segment to cut out of this trailer. If it comes to it, I may just do the rest, but at least I know what the minimum is. Before I begin composing the sounds of the trailer, I first need to make a list of sound effects I will probably need by first watching the trailer. Once I have a list, I can start looking around for sounds and put everything together inside of Premiere Pro.

Trailer Sounds (Rough) List

Footsteps
Jumping
Speech
Clapping
UI Sound Effects
Ambient Sounds / Music
Coin Collecting
Tongue Sounds
Eating sounds
Egg Throw / Crack / Hit
Pushing something
Magnet Connecting
Shell
Water
Dog / Pup
Springs
Console Sounds

Trailer Intro

Final Result & Evaluation

After a bit more work on the trailer, I added many more sounds effects to the project to fully pack it out. To do this, I thought it was best doing one sound effect at a time instead of going through every frame and putting every type of sound effect I needed in it. The first thing I did was the walking sound effects. This was relatively simple, and I also added it a few times when other things landed. After that, I did any of the jumping and coin sounds that required adding, and then it was just about filling in the blank spaces. For starters, the sound Yoshi makes when he sticks his tongue out to grab something was, I believe, unique to just one occasion. However, he later spits things out, so all I did was reverse that tongue sound, change the volume and pitch a bit, and it sounded good.

Adjusting the pitch and volume of sounds was something I did quite a bit of in this project. For starters, I did it quite a bit with the footsteps I already talked about, making them louder if he dropped from a more significant height. Moreover, towards the end of the video in particular, I was changing the time of clips so they would last for the correct amount of time to match up with whatever I wanted them to. This was relatively easy, and then changing the pitch helped me keep it at a good level. However, some sound effects were a bit dodgy, especially one of the whooshing ones, since it sort of had two sounds in one, so it made it sound like I played it twice. Although this was slightly annoying, I tried to move past it and focus on how I could make it work, rather than changing it. This was partly because I'm lazy, but also because I wanted to challenge myself and see if I could make something sound good that wasn't quite ideal, which I think I did quite well. I don't know how many sounds were used in total, but I can tell you it was quite a lot. However, the time paid off, because I think it sounds very convincing and could totally pass as the real thing. Yes, maybe some sounds weren't quite as cartoonish as I would've liked, but it was good nonetheless.

Overall, I think this project has gone alright. I got the minute of the trailer complete within the time, and it sounds pretty convincing. I think all the sound effects I found (using the website FreeSound for all) were pretty good, and included a fair amount of Foley created sounds where I'd take something, apply some effects to it, link it up, and it makes it seem like it was the real sound. Not only this, but the sound have all been lined up very precisely, so there shouldn't be any delay between when the sound plays and when it actually happens, but sometimes in the trailer it does seem like it, even when it isn't true, so it's not perfect, but that's more about how it was made. Unfortunately, although the outcome was pretty decent, I didn't get a lot of time to make it and mostly had to rush this project. This was mostly due to the other projects going on at the same time taking up more time due to (for me) being more beneficial to my education, but also as projects to include on my portfolio. For me, this project was very slow paced and didn't really have a lot of content for me to include. Obviously, I could have done the full trailer, since in this I cut it up a bit so it was just over one minute long, but finding sound effects and dragging them onto a timeline becomes very boring and repetitive quick, and I think one minute is plenty enough to prove I can do it, and this trailer in particular has a lot of sound effect opportunities which I think I took advantage of. One of the main parts that didn't go to plan in this project were some sounds towards the end of the video. In the closing parts, the title of the game gets put up on the screen and the coloured part of the letters pop out. For this, originally I used a sound effect from the assets that are provided by Adobe, but when I went to export, it tells me I need a licence, so unfortunately, I had to abandon that because it took so long to make, but luckily I only found this audio library right at the end, so I didn't need to delete anything else.

After completing this project, there are a few things I probably would change upon doing this again. Firstly, I would do one sound effect at a time. Of course, I didn't fully know what I was doing, but it would've been smart for me to first add in all of one sound, such as the footsteps, and then go around and add others after. This would keep everything a bit more organised and simpler. Talking of being organised, I should've had specific audio tracks for specific audio. In the main, every track should have one or two sounds on, depending on how often they're used, and that would have been helped if I had only used one sound effect at a time from the beginning. Nevertheless, it came out alright, so that's mostly just me wanting it to be easier to read and go back over another time. Something else I would change another time is adding even more sound effects. This sounds simple, but it's not only that, because I would also like to change where you hear the sound. At the moment, every sound effect plays the same volume in each ear. Something I was testing with the title sounds that got taken away from me earlier was adding some difference about where they were played. In that circumstance, it didn't do a lot, probably because it was such a small amount I chose. However, it would've been a cool way to give the person watching a bit more immersion with the spatial audio throughout the whole project.

If I was to continue this mini project, I would definitely start by increasing the length of the trailer to the original length. I think, although I made it shorter, the cut isn't noticeable, and just seems to end a bit earlier than you'd usually expect from a trailer. Aside from the obvious, if I were to keep working on the exact same one, I wouldn't change the audio tracks from what I've already done, but anything I add I would put on a new track and make sure I only do one sound effect at a time. Additionally, I would add a lot more sound effects for all of the small things that happen in the video. I think I've included all the obvious things that happen and that you are focused on, so immersion shouldn't be broken from that, but if the viewer looks around and focuses on something else, not every little detail has a sound, so I'd need to add them. I'd probably do a bit more research by watching other trailers to try to identify what and how they add these other sounds, so I get some inspiration for my project.

Overall, I don't think this project went too poorly. I wish I got some more time to do a bit extra, but then I wonder what more I could've done aside from just increasing the length and adding more sounds that could be deemed as unnecessary.

TWC
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