GETTING THE RECORDINGS

Recording is one of the most fun parts of the sound experience for me, yielding fresh material to work with and inevitably leading to unexpected ideas. I consider it central to the sound design process.

Part of the fun is the stories you’re left with. While recording, I’ve:

• Caught a microphone zeppelin on fire while doing stovetop ignition bursts (twice)
• Had a wolf jump up and attack my mic, hanging on a boom over a fence at a refuge in Arizona and pulling me off my feet
• Crushed a lavaliere mic inside a hydraulic press recording a coffee can crush
• Dropped a piano off a forklift, snapping the cable off a mic planted inside (sorry Kim)
• Watched as my friend Ethan nearly got torched recording the afterburners of a F22 Stealth Raptor fighter jet
• Hung out of the trunk of a Saleen sports car racing at 100 mph while recording the muffler
• Shattered my car windshield, with a mic in the driver seat, after dropping 50 gallons of water from a balcony
• Made a cow cry after separating him from his friends to get some moos. It was heart-breaking.
• Had my rig, with a home-made battery pack resembling a home-made bomb, confiscated by Shanghai airport police
• Been eaten by swarms of bugs recording jungle atmospheres in Cambodia
• Got elephant snot all over my Neumann microphone

I start recording sounds before starting a movie, building the library. Every new sound gets a specific three-letter code, followed by a three to four digit number that then gets catalogued with descriptive metadata in Soundminer for easy retrieval. For example, a big wooden door I recorded for Kung Fu Panda got the code and filename “KFP562 DOOR Big Wood Fox Bldg 29″. The door was at the main entrance to our mix building at Fox Studios, and while recording I could hear a subtle engine hum purring under everything. A little annoyed that someone would leave their car idling for so long and mess up my recording, I looked up from my recorder to ask whomever was parked in front of me to “PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR ENGINE!!!” Sitting in his Bentley was Steven Spielberg. I took a breath and decided to let him off the hook.

I do most recording in my design room, with small props or instruments or whatever I can record close up. Depending on the movie, and especially for action movies, I usually try to avoid getting any “room”, or reverb, in the recording. It’s easy to add later with Altiverb, but hard to remove if it’s tied to the recording. This means having an acoustically dead space.

I’ll also often spend several days on the foley stage recording wild sound effects, not to picture, collecting a palette to use for each movie.

The same way you’d record a musical instrument, you record a prop.

I treat everything I record like an instrument that needs a performance. Only I’m not limited to the instruments in an orchestra … the whole world is an instrument. I try to find the sweet spot of a given thing and not kill it. By not killing it, I mean don’t use tons of force to create a big sound. I find that some of the biggest sounds I’ve made are performed gently, so as to get a nice round richness out of the prop. Once you apply too much force, there’s all attack, all transience, and no round bottom. So for the big stuff, I’m often going gentler. Like in music, when you record a snare drum, if the drummer is slamming the drum with all his strength, all you get is a high end crack, which is fine if that’s what you’re going for. But if you want a rich, full, round snare, you lighten up and let the body ring out of the snare hit. So when I record a big metal hit for example, I try to get a smooth and elegant attack.

That said, some things I want to slam. Guns sound better to me when they saturate a mic or preamp. Vehicles can be the same way. As long as the sound doesn’t break up, I’ll push it into the red.

A lot of recording is done out in the field, like weapons and vehicles. For those kinds of shoots, we’ll run way more channels with a variety of microphones to get different angles and qualities in the sounds. John Fasal is the master of field recording, and I’m always learning tricks from him. On Transformers, we ran 14 channels for our weapons, recording on a Sound Devices 744, two 722s, an HHB 4 channel and a 1/4 inch analog Stereo Nagra for that fat tape saturation sound. We attached a DPA lavaliere mic to the barrel of each weapon, taking care not to get it too hot and melt. I ran my 191 close up, trying intentionally to fold the microphone element for a tasty “thump”. We ran a Pearl Sass stereo PZM about 10 feet back, getting a fuller richer perspective, plus some 4007s, Shoepps and a Sanken.

We were recording on a private range in Colorado, and unfortunately had to battle birds, wind noise, and air traffic. Sometimes you luck out with a location, sometimes you don’t.

We lucked out on the movie Valkyrie. We recorded a lot of the weapons for the North Africa sequence in a canyon, miles away from any road or bird. The natural acoustics of the canyon gave us a beautiful effect on the guns and the WW2 P-40 airplanes we were recording. We were recording during the actual production, and that’s always tricky. Sets are always chaotic, especially during action sequences which are complex and stressful to setup. We were fortunate to be given a production liaison with a gas-powered golf cart and walkie talkies to coordinate with the AD (assistant director), armorer and pilots.

The pyrotechnic crew did a number of explosion setups, which we had a lot of fun with. Ironically, the best explosion recording we got that week was from a cheap little 2-channel M-Audio Microtrack II recorder. I put it in a zip-lock bag and half buried it 5 feet away from a Nazi truck that exploded. The little mic overloaded and gave a perfect, huge, effect. Later in the day, I was caught downwind of a big explosion and spent that whole evening in the hotel room cleaning dirt and debris out of my gear with alcohol swabs and compressed air.

Vehicles often involve complex onboard mic hookups, with mics stationed along the course to get different angles on the rev aways, pass bys and in and stops. But I’ve found that the best racing sounds come from handheld angles, near the muffler, revving at 5000 RPM or more in first and second gears. Onboards frequently lack clarity and “beef”. Also, the skill of the driver is critical. On the first Transformers, we had a really gutsy stunt driver burning rubber for us. On the second Transformers, our driver was a bit timid and needed a lot of egging on. Our motorcycle driver, Tim, was incredible; seeing somebody pop a front-wheel-wheelie and keep it going for 1/4 mile is a sight to behold.

I record everything at 192 kHz, 24-bit, most of the time shooting M-S with my Neumann 191. M-S gives me the ability to dial in the stereo imaging later, getting a clean center or a nice wide image depending on the sound. I’m hoping Soundminer introduces a M-S decoder to their search engine, which would take a step out of the workflow when editing.

Sometimes I experiment with non-traditional microphones. I have several home-made hydrophones, which have come in handy for underwater recording like bubbles, swish bys and tones.

I have a few electromagnetic pickups for recording electrical fields. On I, Robot I used this kind of pickup extensively, collecting weird whines, hums and buzzes by moving the pickup around coffee grinders, copy machines, hard drives and anything electric. It was especially useful for sci-fi power-ups and power-downs, and gives a very nice and real organic feel to the synthetic nature of electromagnetism.

USING THE RECORDINGS

After each recording session, either an assistant will take the time to line up multi-channel angles and get them catalogued, or I’ll set up design sessions with the sounds. Typically I’ll load the raw recordings into ProTools, clean out the crap, and set up a chain of plugins on an insert. These may include an MS decoder, compressor/limiter, EQ, and whatever additional treatment might be appropriate depending on the sound. If I’m doing any extreme pitching or processing, I’ll work in a 192 kHz session to maximize fidelity and have all those extra samples to stretch, twist and manipulate.

I don’t wait to get the recordings mastered. I want to get them loaded quickly so they can be put to use right away. The longer you wait getting sounds loaded and mastered and given metadata, the less likely they’ll get used from the very beginning of the editorial process. I learned this the hard way the first few movies I worked on, where sounds recorded for one movie wouldn’t get used until the next.

One thing I try to keep in mind as I’m designing is how to make sounds that are different and unexpected. We’ve all the heard “clichés” of sound design: monsters made out of big animals, lasers made out of tension coil taps, spaceships made out of processed jets and the like. Clichés can be useful because they instantly reference a sub-conscious convention that is instantly recognizable by an audience. But it can also be fun to twist those conventions and surprise the ear with the unexpected. I’ve made a dragon out of a goose, a laser out of a cabinet creak and a spaceship out of my voice.

I’ll elaborate more on design in subsequent articles. But the ultimate goal is to make a sound that makes you go ” … WOW …”

Written by Erik Aadahl for Designing Sound

The third Game Audio Podcast is available now for download. This time the discussion is about “Interactive and Dynamic Music”, with special guests such as Vincent Diamante (Composer/Sound Designer), Scott Morton (Composer/Sound Designer) and Wilbert Roget (Composer, Music Editor/Implementer).

They also talk about some news featuring software such as Hybrid Reverb 2 – Zappa IR – Wwise 2009.3, things like Korg DS10+, NDS ToneSynth, Conan Interactive Music Video’s, also talk about our Audio Implementation Greats series, and more!

Game Audio Podcast #3

In a continued attempt to shed light on some of the best examples of Technical Sound Design in the current generation, I’d like to call attention to several titles that have pushed the envelope when it comes to the art of ambience. The all encompassing experience of “being there” in a game, where the sense of place is encapsulated in the sound of the environment. Stepping beyond the background din of a given location, we’re moving forward towards the players ability to affect the sound of a space by their interaction with it. This can be as simple as turning off a machine that had been emitting a constant loop of activity, or as complex as scaling the dynamics of a crowd dependent on the current artificial intelligence activity in an area.

THE SHACKLES

Despite leaving behind the memory restrictions of previous generation consoles, hearing a single looping ambience throughout a level or area within a game continues to be common – making any recurring distinct elements of the background clearly identifiable when repeated. While these backgrounds, well designed and teaming with character, still contain the potential to keep the player immersed in the game world, anyone who chooses this approach runs the risk of exposing the limitation this technique to the player. Several best practices have evolved and taken root to combat repetition and further lend a sense of randomness to the sound aspect of the game world.

In an article by Nick Peck back in 2004 entitled “Tips for Game Sound Designers”, a case for highlighting ambient elements which vary in time, duration, and position in order to “Generate 5.1 content without full bandwidth sources” was made. This included the idea of a subtly shifting background ambience with randomly placed elements as a solution to static looping soundscape, and presented a way out of the confinements of the locked loop. While likely that this presentation was not the first time a solution was defined, the practice of ambient creation using these methodologies perpetuates today in step with the advancements in available resources and the increased creativity of audio toolsets.

THE LAND OF THE LIVING

The world of Oblivion can be bustling with movement and life or devoid of presence, depending on the circumstances. The feeling of “aliveness” is in no small part shaped by the rich dynamic ambient textures that have been carefully orchestrated by the Bethesda Softworks sound team. Audio Designer Marc Lambert provided some background on their ambient system in a developer diary shortly before launch:

“The team has put together a truly stunning landscape, complete with day/night cycles and dynamic weather. Covering so much ground — literally, in this case — with full audio detail would require a systematic approach, and this is where I really got a lot of help from our programmers and the Elder Scrolls Construction Set [in order to] specify a set of sounds for a defined geographic region of the game, give them time restrictions as well as weather parameters.” – Marc Lambert

In a game where you can spend countless hours collecting herbs and mixing potions in the forest or dungeon crawling while leveling up your character, one of the keys to extending the experience is the idea of non-repetitive activity. If we can help to offset that from a sound perspective by introducing dynamic ambiance it can help offset some of the grind the player experiences when tackling some of the more repetitive and unavoidable tasks.

“[The ambient sound] emphasizes what I think is another strong point in the audio of the game — contrast. The creepy quiet, distant moans and rumbles are a claustrophobic experience compared to the feeling of space and fresh air upon emerging from the dungeon’s entrance into a clear, sunny day. The game’s innumerable subterranean spaces got their sound treatment by hand as opposed to a system-wide method.” – Marc Lambert

Also on the topic of injecting randomness into the soundscape, from a Game Informer interview with Don Veca regarding the ambient sound design of Dead Space:

“Veca told his audio team to make their ambient tracks a little shorter, more vanilla, in order to create audio with fewer effects that would catch a player’s attention when looped. The team then wrote some software Veca calls “the creepy ambi-patch.” This little piece of code would play separate small sounds, gradually changing their pitch and volume as they panned around Dead Space’s 3D environments. The effect worked beautifully, ensuring that every moment of Dead Space’s ambient backgounds were different no matter how long a person explored, or how many times they replayed a section.” – Game Informer

It should come as no surprise that ambience can be used to great effect in communicating the idea of place, either with ties to reality or to the abstract extreme. When you combine the use of soundscapes and level-based tools to apply these types of systems appropriately, the strengths of dynamics and interactivity can be leveraged to create a constantly changing tapestry that maintains a sense of immersion, and creates a personal experience for every player.

THE TOOLS OF THE TRADE

When it came time to design the creative tools used to implement ambiences in Fable II, the sound designers were able to “paint ambient layers” directly onto their maps. In a video development diary, Lionhead audio director Russel Shaw explains:

“I designed a system whereby we could paint ambient layers onto the actual Fable II maps. So that as you’re running through a forest for instance, we painted down a forest theme, and the blending from one ambiance to another is quite important, so the technology was lain down first of all.” – Russel Shaw

In what could be seen as another trend in the current console cycle, enabling the sound designers to handle every aspect of sound and the way it is used by the game is just now becoming common. The ability to implement with little to no programmer involvement outside of the initial system design, setup, and toolset creation is directly in contrast to what had gone before.

In the past, it was not uncommon to create sound assets and deliver them with a set of instructions – how they should be played back – to a programmer. A step removed from the original content creator, the sounds would then need to be programmed into the level – including any parametric or transition information – where the ability to adjust values would be out of reach for the sound designer. It is clearly a benefit to the scope of any discipline to be able to create, implement, and execute a clear vision without a handoff between departments to accomplish the task.

Many of the audio middleware toolsets currently available enable the Sound Designer a high level of control over the way sounds are reproduced. Some include the ability to randomize a sounds 3D position, even going as far to enable the ability to map positional “paths” using a custom interface. This opens up a further level of variation beyond sound files or pitch and volume randomization, and distributes the action across the soundscape in a way that better resembles our experience’s in real life.

As familiarity with these techniques and functionality of available toolsets increases, we can hope for a level of randomness that keeps the player firmly rooted in diversity and appropriateness of the game world. In this way I feel like we are gaining in the art of audio implementation and sound integration – by putting creative tools in the hands of the interactive-minded sound designers and implementation specialists we are paving the way for the ability to simulate living breathing worlds of sound.

THE NAKED CITY

“There are a thousand tales in the naked city” and if you listen closely enough you might be able to hear most of them during the gameplay of Prototype. That is, if you can keep yourself from wreaking havoc among the citizens of New York…which, let’s face it is nearly impossible. While you probably won’t hear all of the stories that the city has to tell, you will be able to hear the changing voice of that city during your progression from introspective lost soul to amped up superman thanks to the attention to detail by Radical’s Sound Department. In a detailed article, Sound Director Scott Morgan details the implementation that gave Protoype’s cityscape it’s voice.

“So we decided to develop a dynamic system for ambient sound so that New York could speak, through its inhabitants, of its current “emotional” state. If the city was in a relatively “normal” state, we would hear the traffic, the pedestrians and the busy sounds of New York that we all know. As panic ensues, so does the voice of the city, with screaming pedestrians and honking horns. If the player guides his character up to a quiet rooftop or the middle of Central Park, the sounds of New York adapt accordingly. As the infected hordes take over, the sounds voice the pain and suffering of the city and its inhabitants. As the story progresses and the city heads towards its darkest hour, its voice dynamically follows – expressing its state as a character in the story, revealing its suffering.” – Scott Morgan

This touches on a diverging point in the creation of ambience: that the sound of the ambient should react to the gameplay and change dynamically based on what’s happening in the environment as a result of player interaction. As we continue to move closer towards realistically representing a model of reality in games, so should our worlds react and be influenced by sound and its effect on these worlds. This was foreshadowed by Crytek’s Christian Shilling during the production of the original Crysis:

“Ambient sound effects were created by marking areas across the map for ambient sounds, with certain areas overlapping or being inside each other, with levels of priority based on the player’s location. ‘Nature should react to the player,’ said Schilling, and so the ambiance also required dynamic behavior, with bird sounds ending when gunshots are fired.” – Christian Schilling

Schilling went on to explain the basic concept and provide additional background when contacted via email:

“Sneaking through nature means you hear birds, insects, animals, wind, water, materials. So everything — the close and the distant sounds of the ambiance. Firing your gun means you hear birds flapping away, and silence. Silence of course means, here, wind, water, materials, but also – and this was the key I believe – distant sounds (distant animals and other noises)…So, after firing your gun, you do hear close noises like soft wind through the leaves or some random crumbling bark of some tree next to you (the close environment), all rather close and crispy, but also the distant layer of the ambiance, warm in the middle frequencies, which may be distant wind, the ocean, distant animals”
In addition to the triggering of various one-shot sounds, various mix decisions are being made behind the scenes in order to further focus on the appropriate sounds – Insuring that the important aspects of sound are communicated to the player.

THE WAY FORWARD

Thankfully, the continuation of work started years ago to diversify the ambient landscape in games and bring variation and randomness to environmental sound is starting to make headway. With standout examples leading the way, and dedicated individuals sharing their processes and reasoning, we can hope to expand on the creative possibilities enabled by toolsets and best practices to create rich sound worlds for players to inhabit. Focusing on these ambient techniques during game development means the player won’t feel inclined to focus the negative aspect of hearing loop point’s while playing – instead, they can marvel at the interaction between their character and the game world, and let it set the tone for their experience.

Concept Art © Aaron Armstrong: http://aaron-armstrong.blogspot.com/

Written by Damian Kastbauer for Designing Sound.

Damian is a freelance Technical Sound Designer working with the Bay Area Sound Department pulling off cool implementation tricks and spreading the word about interactive audio. Please send all private comments, feedback, and suggestions for future articles to info[at]lostchocolatelab[dot]com.

There is a new interesting interview at Filmsound Daily on the sound of “The Crazies” with supervising sound editors Jeremy Peirson and Laurent Kossayan. Let’s read:

In an interview with Colider.com, Director Breck Eisner explained, “The town is pretty much a character in the film at the beginning and then as the military comes in and the disease takes over, you see the whole world literally turned on its side and you get to watch the decline and decay and destruction of this small, kind-of-perfect American town.” How was this idea of the ideal town implemented in the soundtrack? What sound ideas where used to show its decay?

JP: One of our original ideas was to set up this concept of decay by contrasting life and activity early on in the film. We tried to make the town as active and peaceful as possible.

LK: We made exteriors busy with kids playing and other off screen activities; Lots of birds, too – almost like a cliché ‘happy town’.

JP: As soon as the military enters and it’s clear the sickness has progressed, the birds die off. We wanted to help sell the idea that the water was poison and birds would be affected very quickly. It also helped set up a sense of isolation. The idea of taking these things away leaves you with the question of what’s left. To that end, we allowed the bugs to survive and used them in very interesting ways to evolve and flow during a scene. At the beginning of the scene we might have started off with one set of bugs, but by the end of it, we would have ebbed and flowed through four more different sets of insects, ending with something that sounded completely different.

LK: We designed a layer of drones derived from winds and insects, too, to add weirdness. Additional strange sounding animals one-offs were always placed in the distance and not very talky or obviously sonically noticeable, again to reveal the overall emptiness of the area.
JP: Things would come and go, as the scene needed. In town, we would also hear the clanging of the flag pole, distant metal signs rattling, and weird distant metal squeaks to add to this sense of desolation.

Continue reading…

Transformers has been one of the most important titles for Erik Aadahl’s career. As we are on his special, I take the opportunity to do a mashup of articles, interviews, and videos, trying to put all the info about Transformers and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen I found in the Internet, including also material from the rest of the crew on the mix, dialogue and foley. Also an exclusive interview with Erik on Transformers is coming in the next days.

Transformers (2007)

I’ve read a lot of discussions lately about defining a Sound Designer. What were your duties on Transformers?

Erik Aadahl: The term “sound designer” can mean lots of things. In some cases, a designer is brought in to handle a scene or a concept, with effects editors handling everything else. In other cases, a designer may have a broader role and oversee the overall track. This movie was a little of both–I was brought on by Ethan van der Ryn to design the robots, but as time went by that job broadened to encompass the entire final track. By the end of the final mix, I had plenty of chances to go over the whole film, tweaking details till we couldn’t do it any more.

Had to ask it. Is the signature transforming sound from the cartoon in the film?

Ethan Van der Ryn: We used the original transforming sound twice in the film. It is used for one of the largest transformers and also for the smallest. More importantly we were inspired by the original transformation sound in the creation of new sounds. The very first sounds heard in the movie which play over the Dreamworks and Paramount logos are an example of sounds which are inspired by that original transformation sound vibe.

How much time did you get to spend on conceptional proofs before going full bore on design and editorial?

Erik Aadahl: It all happened at the same time. The first scene I got was Blackout (at the time his name was Vortex) destroying the Qatar airbase. I had a week to come up with the transformation and weapons and destruction and the shape of that very first pass stayed pretty much intact until the end. After that first week, I had a chance to catch my breath and go conceptual again, spending my days under headphones recording everything that might be useful–scissorlift servos, remote control copters, sliding acrylic sheets, power windows–and then throwing them into ProTools to manipulate them into fun sounds. After a few weeks of that, I had a palette of several hundred fresh robot sounds that I could draw from as the movie progressed.

Out of all the Transformers, which was your favorite sounding?

Ethan Van der Ryn: Bumblebee is my favorite sounding Transformer. For me he is the most emotive robot in the film and the emotional center of the film. He manages to achieve this despite or perhaps because he has a damaged voice box which forces him to communicate with a montage of sound fx and songs and old movie lines.

Erik Aadahl: Bumblebee was my favorite, too. I was a pleasure to give him his voice and act for him. We used our own voices with processing to give him his personality. For the emotional scenes where Bumblebee is in pain, we used the pitch down cries of a baby and even a little bit of vocal that Mike Hopkins performed.

Did you guys do anything differently on this film you don’t normally do on others?

Kevin O’Connell: Yes, we basically mixed the movie with mostly temp music tracks. The final music trickled in throughout the mix and was not all available until late during the final mix. At that point I basically had to re-mix the entire music stem on every reel and Greg (Russell) and the sound effects team had to re-shape a bit as well. Having had the benefit of mixing all of Michael Bays films helped enormously on Transformers. Michael is a guy who knows what he likes but more importantly knows what he does not like and communicates that very well.

Read more at FilmSoundDaily: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Erik Aadahl:

“You always hear cool new sounds every day,” Aadahl said. “Like Ethan found a pogo stick online and we started playing with it and realized that it had a really neat sound to it.”

It became part of the unique sounds of a robot named Bumblebee. So did a car door.

“Took that and slowed it down 25 percent and it sounds like a huge robot footstep,” he said.

For a vending machine that comes to life and shoots soda cans, he recorded soda cans dropped from a building.

“It’s a lot of fun when you get to make a little bit of a mess on the job,” he said.

Read more at CBS News

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

Van der Ryn, who worked with Aadahl on the first Transformers, said, “We do a certain amount of brainstorming–how we want shape it and general ideas about what we want things to sound like–but Erik really does the majority of the hardcore sound design work, mostly focused around all the robots, which is what the movie’s all about. Erik’s just incredibly talented when it comes to making it happen. He’s a genius; that’s no overstatement.”

ROTF features 40 or more new robots not in the original film that range in size from tiny insects to 150-foot tall giants. After visiting the art department early on in the film’s development, the supervising sound editors set about creating different sounds for each character from a variety of sources. “We used every trick in the book that we could think of,” said Aadahl. “A lot of it is simple, real stuff, like the Decepticon fly scout–his sound is essentially a grungy old electric razor being shaken.”

He continued, “There’s something very real and immediate about an actual sound that has so much character. It can contrast some of the totally hyper-real absurd things that we’re doing. The goal is that it all fits together like an acoustic puzzle so that there’s the whole spectrum of totally unreal and real–and together they create this universe that transcends the real world but still feels real.”

Work began in August 2008 while Bay was still shooting, according to Van der Ryn. “We went and recorded some vehicles that they had on set, but the main work started at the end of October. We set it up knowing we would want that much lead-time. On a film like this, it’s important to start the sound work in parallel with the shoot and as the visual effects are developing, so the cut can come together with the sound as an integral part of the storytelling process. When you have so many things being created on a computer, the sound really helps bring them to life, so it’s important to get it going earlier. It becomes increasingly important for the sound to start working to ground us in reality and make us believe it, otherwise it just doesn’t work. The sound becomes more valuable in a film like this.”

Aadahl added, “We did the weapons in October. Just on our own, we went on expeditions recording a variety of sounds we knew we would use, just building the palette. We shot a whole array of M16s, AK-47s, sniper rifles, .308s, suppressed ammunition, .22s–but a lot of the robot weapons have nothing to do with real guns. For the RC bots’ weapons, we used compressed air to make squeal sounds, then did little pitch bends on them to make nice little zaps.”

Building on the Transformer theme, many of the sounds feature an organic element, as Aadahl noted. “One thing that we had a lot of fun playing with was a theremin, which we used as a sound design device. It’s basically an oscillator that you can control with your electrical field and adjust volume and pitch. It’s an instrument but you can physically, three dimensionally, control the tone that you’re generating. We’d run that through different processing tools and chains and perform in real time. We made sounds into motors, vocals, all sorts of bends, accelerations, decelerations. That generated a huge amount of new material that’s really different.”

Transformers Revenge Of The Fallen Sound Team

It’s probably the most ambitious sound movie I’ve been a part of,” said Greg Russell. But, he allowed, “The first film really helped to lay out a plan. The initial layout was crucial, and that was done pretty well in the first film. Our starting point on this one was so far advanced in the approach and what we were going to do to bring this film to life. We’re just trying to support what you see onscreen as best we can so it’s believable.”

He added, “The choreography in this film is improved from the first film. The robots are more graceful; there’s a sense of fun to watch them, yet there’s a visceral, aggressive attitude. It’s rough but pretty!”

ROTF features a lot of battle sequences, he continued. “Michael [Bay] wants to keep the activity of that offstage intensity alive, but when there’s onscreen material that is our focal point, we do need to shape that offstage material. We do that in predubbing and even more in finaling. The objective is to focus an audience on a given moment, a given visual, and not be distracted.”

The biggest challenge of the movie was how to get everything to play. Part of the solution for Russell was to create two stems within the final mix, one for hard effects, such as regular military hardware, and another for the robot weapons and sounds. Still, it was necessary to distill the sounds to provide focus: “What can we do to clean this out, to make this much more specific? What can we mute in our Pro Tools session? What can we mix down, or highlight, to get the cleanest possible sequence?”

Russell gave kudos to Van der Ryn and Aadahl: “I really love their focus on trying to deliver very concise, precise elements to me; I don’t have to spend my time weeding out. In a movie of this nature, it’s critical that they edit and make choices before it gets here. Otherwise, we just wouldn’t have the time and it would be a lot messier. It’s been a wonderful collaboration–and I love the sounds; it’s something completely different than anything else out there. I felt that way about the first one, and I feel that way even more on this; I think we’re stretching our legs a little on this movie.”

Read more at ProSound: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Via: SoundWorks Collection

How important was it to separate the robot sound effects from the rest of the track?

Erik Aadahl: That was a whole other realm of “meat and potatoes” recording. Because production was still shooting when we started, we had access to all the Transformer vehicles: an Audi R8, Corvette concept car, Ducati motorcycles, Hummers, semis. So with the help of John Fasal, who is probably the premier recordist in the world, we got some stunt drivers, closed off a section of the Playa Vista Studios and went to town burning rubber. We also sent John on board an aircraft carrier, the USS Stennis, to record deck landings and takeoffs, as well as to Edwards Air Force Base, where we had a B-1 bomber at our disposal to record fly-bys 50 feet off the ground.

What was the sound department’s relationship like with Michael Bay?

Erik Aadahl: Michael has been known for being hard on crews, but he let us do everything we wanted to do. He was excited that we wanted to create something big and bold, but also something that was less of an assault. We heard that the picture department couldn’t wait for him to hang out with us, because when he went back there, he’d be in a great mood!

What was your progression on the mix?

Greg Russell: I usually like to do backgrounds first and then build the rest of the track with all the different treatments and reflections within the backgrounds. In this case, I didn’t hear the background pre-dubs that were done by Greg Orloff until the final mix. For Transformers 2, we start sound effects pre-dubs with the robots, starting with the foundation of the feet and building up to the last pre-dubs, which are the vocals. We do a total of nine robot pre-dubs and then we do the hard effects, starting with vehicles, then weapons, etc., for a total of 14 pre-dubs, and then we do the Foley. The dialogue was done on another stage with Gary.

How many pre-dubs and tracks were you working with?

Greg Russell: We created 14 hard effects pre-dubs that were built from around 500 tracks for guns, explosions, firearms, etc. There were nine 5.1 dubs for the robots, with a total of maybe 600 tracks. Greg Orloff, who was brought in as an additional re-recording mixer, contributed another 80 tracks of feet and backgrounds. Altogether, with all pre-dubs and outboard gear, I was out to 256 tracks on the console, which was pretty much a full load. This also includes an additional 30 tracks we needed for more sweetening, as the cut and the visual affects changed during the mix. The pre-dubs were then used to create a huge supersession that represented the 5.1 of all the premixes. We had two ProTools rigs, one for the hard effects and backgrounds, and another for the robots and Foley. The music rig was 60 tracks –– split out to separate the brass, rhythm, synth, keyboards, guitars and music effects tracks. This was a huge breakdown that gave us great flexibility to be able to selectively utilize what best served the movie.

Gary Summers: We didn’t use a ton of tracks for the dialogue and music — 60 tracks of music score and two stereo pairs of source music. The dialogue consisted of four pre-mixes: production dialogue and ADR, each eight channels, and two group pre-mixes, English and non-English. Because they were cutting picture right to the end, we knew the tracks were going to be put through a cheese slicer in the mix, so it was important for conforming and re-synching to have full separation between the human and robot voices. The editors did an amazing job; they would turn over new versions to us daily, and within two hours we’d be mixing the new version on the stage.

How do you keep such a dense soundtrack from tripping over itself?

Greg Rusell: That is truly the art form of this type of movie; I’ve now done 180 in my career. I draw upon everything I’ve done in the past and ask, “How do we look at each and every moment in a sequence and make it great? What do we really need to hear or don’t need to hear. If it’s with music, then so be it; if it’s effects, how do we sculpt it without being muddy and noisy?” Being selective in your creative choices is what will make or break those moments, and that’s what I love most about this job.

Gary Summers: In scenes such as the huge fight in the woods, there is a lot of percussion and you have to make choices as to what you want to hear. Sometimes we left the percussion in and pulled the robot footsteps down because you want to create the driving rhythm while the robots are running through the woods. Other times, you lose the percussion and let the hits and big punches shine. The audience won’t perceive the shift, because you’re just substituting one rhythmic pattern for another. Later in that scene, a major robot character is killed, and there is a major stylistic change, with choral music and voices and effects set back in the reverb. It’s abstract and surreal, and provides a nice contrast to all the frenetic action that precedes it.

Read more at MPEG: Part 1 | Part 2

The voices

How were the robot voices created?

Erik Aadahl: There is a lot of alien language, and I worked on that along with Mike Hopkins, who is the ADR and dialogue supervisor. I won’t give away my tricks, but I will say that conceptually, we wanted it to read as language, but because these are robots, we needed to convey the idea of data transfer. We went frame by frame into these little languages integrating specially designed sounds for each character that would accent certain syllables, and would, for example, replace a consonant with computerized sound for that part of the word. We’d have the shape and feel of language, but it would be a hybridized, digital language.

Mike Hopkins: We shot a lot of robot ADR. Their lines changed quite a bit, so we had a few “go backs.” Also, we had a lot more talking robots this time, so a lot of studio hours were used. As Michael hates ADR, I didn’t cue as much as I would have on any other movie. We only used ADR when the production was totally no good. Even then, it would sometimes take a bit of convincing to be allowed to use it. For the human characters, I would say we used no more than 300 cues all up, including loop group singles.

“All of our sounds are performing almost like actors,” said Aadahl, whom Bay described as the “secret weapon” of the films. (via)

Do you want more? Check:

• Transformers Sound Panel Event Videos
• Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen Interview on AudioMedia
• Kevin O’Connell and Greg Russell Interview on Mix
• Greg Russell, Gary Summers and Geoffrey Patterson – Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen
• Greg P. Russell Interview – Revenge of the Fallen

More Info:

• Trasformers at IMDb
• Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen at IMDb
• Transformers Official Site

Audio

Slides

A few notes abot the gun and animal shoots that are featured in the talk:

The gun shoot was done over 2 days in the fall of 2005 just outside of Los Angeles. It was for the Sony PS3 game Warhawk. There were 3 recordists on that shoot. John Fasal was the lead recordist. Chris Clanin (Warhawk audio lead) and I were the other 2. The samples presented in the talk were taken from all 3 recordists (John ran the most channels, so a good number of samples are probably his, the Nagra was definitely his). I don’t remember how many channels we had or which samples came from which recorder.

The animal shoot was in spring of 2005 in Big Bear, CA. It was for a PS2 project I was working on at the time called Neopets (don’t look it up, it’s terrible). I brought along 2 other sound designers from Sony (Jeff Darby and Brad Aldredge) to assist me in recording, each recordist ran their own machine (either in stereo or mono). I remember I used a Fostex FR2 at 24bit 96K with a Sennehiser MKH40 mic. All of the animal samples are from my recordings.

Julian Kwasneski, Jared Emerson-Johnson, and Damian Kastbauer, the guys at Bay Area Sound had a nice interview at MOJO, talking about his work on the company, the previous titles they worked on, and more.

If you’ve played any game listed in the Mojo database, there’s a good chance that you’re familiar with the work of Bay Area Sound or the seasoned team behind it. Formed in 2000 by Julian Kwasneski and Clint Bajakian after years of serving in-house in the LucasArts audio department, the respected company offers everything from sound design, musical scoring, and voiceover work for game projects. In addition to being the go-to guys for LEC and Telltale, BA Sound also handles the audio for the other LEC spinoff studios, and as a result their high caliber work can be heard in the likes of Psychonauts, Insecticide, and A Vampyre Story as well.

Given that one of the most consistently cited areas of excellence in these games is their sound, and considering that many of the same dudes that are responsible for the audio of the LEC classics continue to play such a crucial and dependable role in the games we anticipate even now, it’s clear that BA Sound, today primarily run by Kwasneski and Sam & Max maestro Jared Emerson-Johnson, is something of an unsung hero in the Mojo world. Fortunately, we were able to briefly coax some of its key people away from their hectic schedules, and the result is this enlightening and long overdue interview for your enjoyment. Read as our prodding questions are answered and we learn what goes on behind-the-scenes when creating game audio, and why in the case of BA Sound the end result is more than just background noise.

Read the interview…

Via: @lostlab

Last year’s No Country for Old Men is another great example, where the beep of a tracking device tells us the villain is slowly approaching–a far scarier technique than just showing the guy walking up. What we don’t see is often scarier than what we do see, and sound is a great tool to achieve that.

But sometimes the script can be a little misleading. I don’t know how many times I’ve read “and then they fight”; just four words on the page, but depending on the director those four words may translate to 20 minutes of insane action.

If we’re lucky, we get a chance to visit the art department during production. On Transformers, this was very helpful to give us an idea of the different robot characters we’d be be dealing with, since the animators might not have a finished shot for another year or more. We browsed conceptual artwork and got an idea of what types and sizes of robots we’d be dealing with, and what sort of vehicles they’d turn into, giving us a head start to get into the right head space while prepping.

Sometimes we get started with a little sequence that may be mostly storyboard or animatics, which is blocky temp computer animation. It’s amazing how a crappy-looking previz scene improves once there’s some sound put in to glue it together and bring it to life. Ideally, those sounds get put in the cut and go to the animators who may (or may not) draw inspiration from it. I love that sort of cross-pollination.

We’re lucky to sometimes get schedules were the sound crew gets started before the picture department delivers a cut. This is play time, and because we’re not grounded by the picture, we can design blindly with a completely blank canvas, which can be very fun. In this phase, I’ll start making different categories of sounds depending on the movie.

During this period for Transformers, I recorded every motor, winch, scissor lift, power window, printer, copier, scanner, remote control servo and gizmo I could think of. That started getting boring and monotonous, so about a week in I started manipulating the sounds to un-ground them from reality. Mind you, this is before we even saw a scene of the movie. Ethan Van der Ryn suggested I try an experiment and do a “vocal pass”. I really wasn’t sure what that meant, so I bummed a smoke to get my voice gravelly and raspy and sat in the dark making weird growls and nonsensical babble into a mic for a day, and then played with those sounds, twisting and processing. This is often the most fun part of the process, playing and experimenting and building the show library. Those vocal sounds became the genesis of Bumblebee’s voice, and a good portion of Megatron’s evil vocalizations and breathing.

Before filming of Valkyrie was complete, I was planning on visiting my 95 year old grandma in Europe, and used it as a chance to record more authentic atmospheres.

Before starting work on Shrek 4, we knew we’d need a war horn sound, so an editor we work with –Tobias Poppe–arranged a recording session of easily 50 different conches, shofars, cow horns, antelope horns, ram horns, a euphonium, you name it. We also started collecting large carnivorous animal sounds, mules and donkeys, wood and armor, creaky carriages and magical sounds like belltree glisses and anything sparkly we could get our hands on or create. We didn’t know if we’d need all the sounds, but better having too many at the ready than not enough!

This kind of prep work always gives us unexpected ideas. And bottom line, it’s fun. And doing all this before seeing the film gets us ahead of the game so we can spend our editing time taking it to the next level instead of just playing catchup. Because the bottom line is, no matter how long the schedule, there’s always going to be a ton of work, and falling behind is as inevitable as gravity.

Written by Erik Aadahl for Designing Sound

Last friday I watched “Alice in Wonderland“. Personally I like the way Tim Burton focused this “version” of Alice. A lot of detail, really beautiful art and a fantastic new adventure, with all kind of places and creatures in a great 3D experience. The sound was also great. The sound team did an excellent job creating the fantastic soundscape of “Wonderland”.

SoundWorks Collection has published a new video featuring Sound Re-recording Mixers Tom Johnson and Michael Semanick who talk about the sound of the film, the mixing, dialogue and the challenges they found.

Visionary Director Tim Burton returns with an all star cast including Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, the queens Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway, and Alan Rickman as the caterpillar bringing to life the magical return of “Alice in Wonderland”.

More info about the sound of “Alice in Wonderland” soon. Stay tuned!

“Learning the technology is important, but learning to use your ears is more important.”

-Randy Thom