We’re going back in time 34 years and deep into South American jungle for this one.

Arnie and some other super macho dudes are smoking cigars and sweating profusely.

They ain’t got time to bleed, but if it bleeds, they can kill it.

The original Predator.

34 years since Predator was first aired and the bold sounds, repetitive motifs and sound effects in this ground-breaking sci-fi masterpiece are still revered to this day. There’s no better place to look for some technical and conceptual Sound Design inspo.

John Pospisil and Dave Stone were the two heavyweight sound editors tasked with overseeing the design and editing of the sound effects on Predator (seriously these guys have worked on almost every iconic Sci-fi blockbuster from the 80’s and beyond).

Let’s get inside the head of the Predator, quite literally.

The need to visually and audibly represent a living, breathing, technologically advanced lifeform without explicitly showing the creature’s whole form gave birth to what was affectionately known as Predavision.

Predavision was a culmination of many sounds, each serving a specific purpose.

The first sound we hear is the crack of a whip, mangled and digitized beyond recognition through an Eventide H3000 harmonizer/pitch shifter. This gives an ‘electrical’ quality to the sound and is used to mark the visual transition from jungle to Predavision every single time.
Interestingly, as the film progresses and the Predator draws ever closer to Arnie and his macho crew, the whip crack becomes less enveloped in reverb and more present in the mix.

Accompanying the whip is the main base layer of the Predavision – a simple one note drone from the iconic ARP2600 mono synth. This slowly-evolving buzz also serves to add an air of ‘electronic’.

The heartbeat. To give the large techno-alien’s three hearts some life, a synthetic heartbeat was creating by manipulating a wet sponge inside a glass flower vase and feeding this sound through a broken old Akai S1000 sampler. The rhythmic manipulations of the sponge were odd-meter to add an irregular, non-human element to the heartbeat. This was then layered with a regular human heartbeat from the Universal Sound Library to complete the effect.

Finally, to put the Predavision ‘in the scene’, all the regular foley sounds from the footage were separated out and individually mangled through the Eventide H3000 pitch shifter. Basically, all of the sounds you hear during Predavision are manipulated through the pitch shifter using similar settings to give a sense of cohesion between all the layers and to further remove them from their normal human associations.

The sparse, yet powerful sound design work creates an organic, suspenseful palette of sounds that effectively captures the stark contrast of dense jungle occupied by an other-worldly imposter. We are regularly jolted out of the expansive jungle soundscape and sucked into the POV confines of the Predator’s mind. This is a prime example of creative applications of limited technology.

These days, achieving such sounds is much less of a physical struggle and the possibilities are as endless as your creativity.

If you’re interested in exploring sound for your project, feel free to get in touch 🙂

Talk soon!