That's Not A Demon, That's A Toilet Plunger!

[chrob]

You're in the room with the client and you have created a masterpiece of a design for their visually arresting creature. The gurgles gurgle, the roars are deafening, the flames sound so hot they could burn you, and the ice crystals...crystal. It's perfect.

The client is thoroughly blown away. Their hair is slicked back either from the sound emanating from the speakers, or because they used too much product - hard to tell, hard to care because you KNOW this thing whips ass.

The client turns to you and he or she asks: How did you do it?
You crack a grin and start pulling up your session file: "You'll never believe it, the secret layer is..."

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A lot of us have had some of truly strange and surprising wins, especially when it comes to creature designs.
Throughout your careers, I'm curious to hear what some of you have found your most bizarre successes with, when it comes to creature designs!

[noisejockey]

"You'll never believe it, the secret layer is your extremely informative, context-rich direction as to what the moment(s) really needed to feel like."

[Nikolaj de Haan]

The porridge layer worked really well in this creature experiment I did the other day: https://twitter.com/nikolaj_dehaan/stat ... 0657635332

Most of the creatures I have done for games have been based around my own voice, because I needed a lot of different emotions rather than "just" roars and growls, and that was just sooo much easier with your voice than any other props

[chrob]

Ooooh that's a pretty good one.

If I had to add my own to this, I'd say that one time I had to do some "heartbeat" sounds for an alien creature and it's "circulatory system" and I was having trouble getting away from the very human tha-thump, tha-thump of a heartbeat. I decided to try the ol kitchen sponge in a large carafe and it really pulled things together as the main layer that got the point across really well without being too familiar. Even worked in some of that gurgliness into it's voice!

[nickdymond]

Great question. I'm loving the answers so far.

I guess mine is a variation of some of the above that I used for some gurgling, dying breaths of a small beast:

A dog's squeak toy and some rice pudding. This particular toy was a 'pig' with the squeak-hole placed strategically (hilariousy?..) in the middle of its butt. So... squeezing The Pig empty then dipping its butt into the bowl of rice pudding and 'inhaling' some of the slop. Then re-emitting the pud back out the butt. Pitch to taste.

I have vivid memories of being in the shared office kitchen later that day feeling very proud of myself as I gave the toy an(other) enema to clean-out the remaining pudding. Good times.

[david guinot]

retractable underwater mine, used an umbrella with couple of glitchmachines sauce and "tada" joke aside, ppl are always amazed, myself included, with how much the human voice can instantly create believability.