Iko Uwais probably rings you a bell from the recent Netflix series Wu Assassins, and if you happen to also know about his past films, you probably know he is always fighting around and beating everyone with his spectacular cinematographic silat techniques. That is also the case in The Raid (2011), although, if you happen to not have seen it and you just watch the excerpt below, you will think, what the hell has just happened to this good man, walking through the corridor as he is just seen a ghost?
NARRATIVE CONTEXT
Well, that is kind of the feeling I musically wanted to give to the scene. He is certainly agonising (wounded as he is and finding it difficult to walk) and hallucinating (look at his face, he does not know right now where he is, what his name is, his mum's or cat's...). From that the title, "agonia" and "alucinacion" in Spanish, altogether. Of course, I you have watched the film you know that this is just the mental result of having just killed some people (as self-defence, of course...) but if you do not know, why not create the mystery?
Maybe he has been drugged, or some previous mental disorder is affecting him. He totally seems to be in another world, and you certainly see that when he finds his friend and it takes a while for him to recognise him. His mate asks him: "Que haces aqui?" (What are you doing in here?, in Spanish). He is in shock.
RESAMPLING SYNTHESIZERS
So in order to emphasise this mental confusion, first thing that came to my mind is to create a mixture of sounds that occupied different frequency spaces but that was able to work as one that led the attention to the increase of tension. So I sampled some drone sounds from Reactor 6 FX and some standard strings, high and low, pitch them in the Ableton's sampler and worked with them as layers. I resampled them with its pitch automated until they all sounded homogeneous.
The kind of bell sounds were to add the little magic spark of surrealism to the background, to emphasize the disconection of the character from the real world. The original sound was brighter and more prominent, but i got it filtered, got the transients echoed and carefully edited its presence through the scene so it was not too evident. So, got it! When the other caracter from the scene grabs uwais, it is just like grabbing an alien from Mars and traumatically bringing it back to Earth.