More cool tips on working with audio development for the iPhone, this time from Nathan Madsen at iDevGames.

Introduction

Because creating audio content specially for the iPhone isn’t too drastically different than creating audio for any other game, this article is a relatively brief collection of tips about how to best adjust audio for the iPhone.

Where’s the bass?!

The iPhone has one external speaker at the bottom end of the device, and a headphone jack at the top left location. The speaker is very small but has decent quality, however you will get very little low end bass from the speaker. The headphones will give you a much better stereo mix. As long as you are aware that your audio can be heard in either of these ways, and plan for it, you can create audio that sounds appropriate and solid in both situations.

File size and type

File types are important on the iPhone, especially MP3s. The iPhone cannot stream multiple MP3 files at once. The most common way to approach the sounds in a game is to have music be a streaming MP3 file (at stereo 128k if the file size is small enough, mono if it needs to be smaller) and use WAV or CAF for the one hit SFX (Sound Effects). SFX are usually down sampled to 22k but that can depend on the game’s graphics and other processing needs. The more simple the game, the more CPU power you have to work with audio and vice versa. When contracting out for a game, always ask the client what the maximum file size is for the streaming music. One of my clients required about 1.5 MB which is equivalent to about a minute and a half or so of music. Another client wanted two and a half minutes of streaming music, so it can vary from project to project.

If possible, attempt to make alternative versions of the same song, and give them to the client. It can be as simple as muting several of the tracks, changing the instrumentation, or performing a different solo. For a client that is open to a larger audio footprint this can really help keep the music within a certain size (per each individual file) but give more variety and make the music less repetitive.

Continue reading…

Via The Sonic Spread

Great interview on In Contention with Skip Lievsay (Re-recording Mixer, Supervising Sound Editor) talking about the sound supervision and mix of “True Grit”.

Continuing today with our week-long look at the below-the-line elements of the Coen brothers’ “True Grit,” we’re chatting with sound re-recording mixer Skip Lievsay.

Along with Carter Burwell, Lievsay is one of only two of the individuals we talked to who goes all the way back to “Blood Simple” with the Coens.  What that says to me is that these filmmakers have maintained a sense of sonic consistency in their films over the years and put plenty of thought into the overall sound experience.

Lievsay was finally recognized by the Academy in 2007 for his and his collaborators’ work on “No Country for Old Men,” an understated piece of work that was fortunately not overshadowed completely by large scale productions that year.  This year he delighted in tackling one of his favorite genres: the western.

Lievsay was responsible for integrating dialogue and music into the mix, while his partner, Craig Berkey, handled sound effects.  He’s a candid and thoughtful fellow.  Have a listen to our chat below, and again, make sure you check back throughout the week as we continue this series of conversations.

Listen here…

RedFly/Frank Teran

If you talk to anyone in game audio today about successful tempo synced synergy between music and sound effects it wont take long for your discussion to end up at REZ and the work of  Tetsuya Mizuguchi. The quintessential poster boy for synesthesia in video games and a stunning example of overt spontaneous interactive music creation.

But imagine for a moment stripping away the throbbing electronica pulse and replacing it with an organic instrument-based soundtrack created by one of the foremost prodigy of curiously inspired noise making bass thumpers, with sound effects locked to a groove oriented metronome, and you’ve got makings of a monster.

“Whereas many games today occupy free-formed soundtracks that respond entirely to the player, Mushroom Men is recorded to a beat. “You have sparks sparking in time to the music, and there are moments when the background music backs out and you hear the cricket cricking on beat,” says Jimi Barker, another sound designer with Gl33k.

“Piersall continues, “You want to make it seem like the world plays to a beat.””

-Austin Chronical Article: Making Mushrooms Dance

Click here to view the embedded video.

This brief overview sparked a fascination in me regarding the potential for experimentation in the realm of reactive and interactive music. I was lucky enough to end up down in Austin, TX for the 2009 Game Developers Conference and had a chance to connect to the fine fellow’s at Gl33k, the audio house behind the sound for Mushroom Men, The Maw, Comic Jumper, Ghostbusters (Wii), and more recently Epic Mickey. Not only did they unlock the secret door to the Austin underground, they also proved to be unmatchable hosts and a great group of guys with their sights firmly set on revolutionizing outsourced audio.

I had a chance to chat recently with Matt Piersall, Pres and New School Beast Handler at Gl33k, about everything from Drinks at the Death Star to syncopated bee buzzing. The full audio proceedings of this meeting of the minds can be found at GameAudioPodcast.com and a transcription has been provided by esteemed game audio professional Michael Taylor.

[DK]: Damian Kastbauer
[MP]: Matt Piersall

DK: Mushroom Men, man, that was a beautiful thing with regards to the way that the music came together, and that was the first title for Red Fly. Can you talk a little about how you guys got involved with that project, and what the first steps ended up being?

MP: Yeah, basically the way that we got involved was, my very first game job was at Terminal Reality as a Contractor. A guy there that (has since) left, his name was Jeff Mills, he was a Level Designer. He left Terminal Reality. They did Ghostbusters, and have tech they built called the Infernal Engine,  which we still use on some projects, and is pretty cool. What ended up happening was that I ran into him, like four or five years later at GDC. I had a drink with him at, you know that Death Star bar.

DK: Yeah! At the top of the Marriott?

MP: Yeah, we had a drink there, and I gave him a USB key demo, and was like, I really wanna…I saw the project, and I thought it was gonna be really cool. It just seemed like something I always wanted to do, in terms of establishing a new IP. Everything I had worked on up to that had had been a sequel;  a two, or a three; something was wasn’t as completely creative. That’s how we initially got involved.

I love sound design, and it had always been a goal of mine to work really closely with a developer. Basically what Gl33k does now is support developers with outsourced implementation, sound design, and audio direction. I sent in a bid to Red Fly, and they were like “Oh, can we get some music for this amount of money, because that is basically all of our budget for sound” and I said: “Yeah, that sounds really cool. I’d love to make some music” They seemed like a young enough studio, open to new ideas so I was like “ Yeah, lets make some music”

So, we ended up doing a couple of tracks, and there wasn’t a lot of movement at first, and then they came down to Dallas, where we were originally located. When they came down to Dallas, we got margaritas, and we started discussing ideas. I started talking about how I had always wanted to do a musical video game. Not as in playing music, but as in, literally a musical, people are singing and stuff like that.

DK: Like ‘Westside Story: The Videogame’?

MP: Exactly! [laughs] So, we had this long talk, and everybody got kinda tanked, and they agreed at that meeting the we should have this Metronome system. After that meeting, months went by, things were very slow moving. They didn’t have a way to get us builds in Perforce, so they had to package them up (via FTP). This is really early y’know! We were downloading 4-5Gb of data, and not understanding how things worked at all, and really having very, very little communication with the team.

We came to (their studio up in) Austin one time, and I did a mock-up: I captured some footage from one of the builds that I had, and I made some music, and I made an environment noise in Ableton, and the environment noise was rhythmic. So I did all this all this rhythmic stuff, and then I comped a video together, and I show them and they loved it. They were like “Alright, cool. We’re definitely gonna move on this, and make this metronome thing a reality.”

In that same meeting, they said; “You guys should move to Austin, what are you doing in Dallas?” I was like; “You know what? That’s a really good question!” At the time, all of our clients except one were either in Austin, or LA . We had five months of work, and I was like “Let’s move to Austin!”. In retrospect, that was really crazy. I’m trying to be more, I guess careful, so I’m trying to plan six moths out,  if I don’t know what’s going on in six months, I start to freak out!

DK: Awesome. And that kind of positioned you closer to Red Fly, your studio is right next to their development house now, and kinda that’s how you stepped into that pond up in Austin?

MP: Yes, actually Austin has a lot of developers, maybe around fifty or sixty? And its helped us out a lot. We always work with Retro Studios, we work with Disney… they’re all in town. I think where we are there are four developers on the same street.

DK: Not to jump the shark on this, but as an outsourced audio company, you have this autonomy and location (theoretically) becomes less of an issue. But I think that, maybe where your driving with the Mushroom Men story, the move to Austin, and your proximity to Red Fly, it must have really helped with development.

MP: Well, at the time, just to be completely real about our experience level at that time, we had mainly delivered assets. We delivered them kinda over the fence, like a lot of sound houses do it. The proximity thing was completely necessary. I believe that you can be remote and do a great job, because we’ve had to do that before, but what you don’t have at a distance is that you don’t get the same camaraderie with the team. You have to have a lot of face-time, even if you live thousands of miles away. In this case, I loved Austin, and always wanted to live here, it just has a cool life to it, and so many developers. The game community and the development communities here are really active. I don’t think we could have accomplished what we did had we not moved.

DK: Sure. It sounds like you could pass builds over the wall, you could step next door and talk with the guy who was doing the wiring under the hood, because you were not using any middleware for Mushroom Men, it was all proprietary Red Fly developed action.

MP: Yeah, it was the old Infernal Engine. It’s been updated a lot since and is really great. The old engine, from a level design standpoint was pretty cool, but from an audio standpoint, we didn’t even have things like pitch randomisation. It was very, very bare bones. But when we got here, it was great. We had Perforce access, and everything happened so much faster. We could attend meetings, and meet some of the guys doing animations, camera, effects.. We just sort of became a part of their team.

DK: Right on. From that point, once you had moved across the state, how did things come together technically? Over drinks you had decided this was going to be a metronome based system, that had repercussions that cascaded throughout the entire game design, because now you are not only syncing audio, but you are also syncing visuals, animation and VFX.

MP: The reality is that I wished that we had used it in a more extreme way. We got the functionality, and from the audio side we used it all over the place, and we did a lot of experimentation with that. From the design side, a lot of people used it, but it was so subtle that you barely notice it. In retrospect, I would have said we should really play it up with camera cuts, and UI elements coming in on beat, which those do actually, but its super subtle. Animation on beat was a little more difficult, because they had to build the animations to a beat. Particle effects were fairly easy, because we had emitters that would fire them off on beat. Essentially the whole system was kind of like a sequencer. Kind of like an 808, it would listen and fire off events.

I look at Mushroom Men as a great learning experience. We worked on it for about a year, but we did most of the work after beta. We had nine months of preproduction, then we worked for three months! [laughs]

DK: That sounds about right! Was there quantisation used as those events were fired off? I mean, did they have to do a lot of juggling of those events in order to line them up? That’s got to be part of the system, right?

MP: Yeah, its totally part of the system. The way the system worked was that you would have a stream. The stream was your backing track, that was the main music that made everything fall on beat. So we started that paused, and then we waited and we kicked out an event to everything. Everything would update every second on a tempo of 120 BPM to recheck that is was still on beat. It was really cool, and I wished we had used it even more. I ended up getting in a little trouble, I took too much liberty and snuck in and synced some things that weren’t originally synced. You just kind of had to do that. It ended up making the end product cooler for sure.

DK: You bet! Can you give us some examples of things for people who may be picking up the game for the first time after reading this article? What kinds of things should they be listening for that you think exemplify the system and its capabilities?

MP: Well, actually there are about three or four things that I’m into, and I hate everything else. [laughter] Ok, so there’s these bees in one of the levels, and we made a track that was the theme for the bees that was like [sings/buzzes theme]. We tied this into the bees particle effect so that its in sync with the…[buzzzes like a raver bee] So yeah, the bees are buzzing on beat, which I thought was really fun. Actually, every ambience in the whole game is rhythmic. I took everything into Ableton and made all looping, streamed ambience rhythmic somehow, even if its not real obvious. You know how in Ableton you can do these ‘stutter’ edits? It’s really subtle, but we did a lot of that with volume ducking for the streamed ambience., and we kicked off wood creaks and crickets and all the insects you hear which are making a beat, and every single localised and spatialized emitter based ambient sounds are on beat too. The only sounds in the game that aren’t on beat are the enemy fighting sounds, because they didn’t want to change their game design too much to support this Metronome thing, because that was not what the game was originally pitched as.

DK: Totally. So is this a good point to segway into talking about how you roped in Les Claypool to lay down some magic on this? This is maybe a side topic to the actual Metronome system, but it plays a huge role, and I feel like its one of the few crossover examples of popular music contributing to games in a very unique way.

MP: Yeah, totally. The way Les Claypool got involved was through the guys at Red Fly, who are huge Claypool fans. They got some cash together and approached Les and said “Hey, do you want to do music for this video game?” I don’t think he was that interested at first, as I don’t think he digs games that much, but his son loves games, and convinced him to do it. Actually, his son, who is like seven or eight, actually plays on the Mushroom Men soundtrack. I think his daughter does too, I think they play percussion on it, which is really cool. But basically he ended up getting involved, and I met him, his wife and his kids and we talked about what we wanted. I didn’t really feel like I could give him much direction, but I said “Hey you’re gonna do what you do, but if you could just write everything at 120BPM that would really help me out.” and he said “Sure, no problem”. In addition to that, I also requested stems, because you have to have that. We had written a bunch of themes at Gl33k, and we had done this one thing that was really, really fun, and I would love to do this on a bigger scale. We went to this small college town in Texas called Denton, and we recorded with this band called Midlake. So we just holed up in their studio for three days, and just recorded a ton of material. And so we went and remixed some stuff and got some tracks out of that material. Then we got Les’ stuff, and we remixed that and mixed it with what we already had and oddly enough it all kind of worked.

DK: That’s such a great story because I think what you’re talking about is angling toward the way a lot of game music is coming together these days, with regard to having composers composing music, and then having to rip it apart for the various systems and remixing it to achieve the different intensity levels for instance.

MP: Absolutely. Its cool too, because I could never do what Les Claypool does, and I couldn’t do what the Midlake guys have great guitar players, a great drummer and a great keyboard player, and they added some little bits in there. Basically what I ended up being was a remix artist, which is more my background; electronic music stuff. Basically Mushroom Men is a huge remix album, with a bunch of random sources.

DK: Remix and Orchestrator, while your designing and interactive orchestrator of sorts, which the Metronome system is, you have to be the maestro of that system and build content to support that. I think that is a great concept and a great analogy for the way a lot of game music comes together these days

MP: Yeah, it’s really cool, and is kind of exciting to me. I’ve been guilty of it in some of the games I’ve been involved in – the wallpaper music. Sometimes you can’t get away from it, because time is always an issue. And if you don’t plan for it,   or set out to say you’re gonna do this crazy interactive music thing, then you’re not going to accomplish it. It’s not one of those things where during alpha you’re like “Oh by the way, we need a intensive dynamic music system.” I love Wwise so much, because you can kind of fake some of that if you get in late in the game. But you still need to sit down with your programmers and the tech people and get a cool system in there earlier or it’s not going to happen.

DK: Right. It’s the two-way street of communication. In order to be interactive music, it has to interact with the game. If the game isn’t sending it information to react to or interact with, then you can’t truly have interactive music.

MP: Exactly

DK: I hear you. You have to plan for it. It has to be part of the design, and I think that when you do approach it holistically like that as part of the design, then you can better communicate that to the composer and take it to the next level with through remixing to make sure it hits all the right spots.

MP: Definitely.  One of the biggest things that I found remixing did for us was that it just gave us so much content, and that’s one of the things that makes it work. It was easy to make new content, a new track would take only a couple of hours rather than produce a minute every day, or two days.

DK: Do you ever see re-visiting the Metronome, and the idea of beat-synced sound? Is there a place for it?

MP: There’s absolutely a place for it. I really wanted to explore this for Epic Mickey, but I got involved a little to late to really push forward with that. Hopefully, maybe on a future project we could maybe do something along those lines.

I think the place for it is that it’s not just for cartoon stuff, or weird, psychedelic worlds. I think you can use it in a lot of ways. You could use to enhance any moment. The gamer doesn’t necessarily always want everything on beat, but even having something on rhythm in a super realistic, really intense first-person-shooter could be really effective if it’s used right.

Exploring new systems and concepts like these is one of my passions, and keeps me interested in this business. The reason that I got into game audio was that I felt that it was a way to let people experience this creative outlet that you have, but you don’t have to be there. And so, the more creative and interesting the system, and I guess I’d call it ‘audio-driven design’  where its not necessarily that the audio drives the entire design, it’s just that the audio provides a bigger role than just a supporting one, like supporting player feedback. There should be bi-directional communication; the audio should communicate the the game, and the game should communicate to the music. Right now, a lot of games are starting to do it, and the quality bar of that has risen so much.

DK: Right, and at the end of the day, you still have to serve the game, and the style of game. But also having this two-way street of communication to allow for greater interactivity. I think we’re taking slow steps towards that.

MP: To be completely open about the Mushroom Men stuff, we just scratched the surface. We had the chance to do something kind of interesting, and it turned out to be pretty cool. I really loved working on it, and working on a system like that, which ended up being kind of a feature. We got to do some cool stuff with ‘Splosion Man too, so we’ve had a few chances to do some cool things. It’s not always an easier sell though, because sometimes they call audio teams only when things are on fire [laughter].

DK: [laughter] I saw that coming a million miles away! That’s when they call all right!

MP: I can understand though, you don’t want to waste a bunch of money on an audio team if you aren’t ready for them yet. But at the same time, I’d rather have a small team the whole way through, and then go from two people to twelve people at the end of a project.

DK: Beautiful thing! This has been a great talk about Mushroom Men. I feel like we covered a ton of space on it, and it’s great to hear about it all. It’s such a unique moment in time that you captured through both the implementation, the remix and the composition of Les Claypool’s work and that synergy that came together for Mushroom Men that was extremely unique in my opinion.

MP: We did some cool stuff, but if there’s anything I’d take from it, it’s that it’s a way that I like to work. It proves that you can outsource and bring in specialists to do certain things for a project. It basically proved that the way I like to work is viable from a critical standpoint.

DK: For sure. And creatively satisfying?

MP: Oh my gosh, yes! I miss that part of it. It was the most fun I’ve ever had on a project. It was a great time of life, we had just moved here, I lived across the street from the studio and there are 90 bars within a square mile! Great times!

Gameplay footage focusing on synced ambient sound @ 6:20 and with music @ 8:00:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Gameplay footage focusing on Bee combat:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stick around after the interview for a discussion on the late Austin GDC audio track, AES Game Audio, Footsteps experiences, and general banter between friends.

So this is the New Year…

The turning of the new year marks the one year anniversary of both the Audio Implementation Greats Series here at Designing Sound, as well as the Game Audio Podcast which I co-founded with Anton Woldhek around the same time. Over the course of the year we’ve covered topics that are relevant to professionals working in the industry such as: Footstep Design, Interactive Music, and Procedural Audio, and will be pressing into the new year with exciting new topics.

Beginning in 2011 we’ll be kicking out a fantastic discussion about Interactive and Dynamic Mixing with David Mollerstedt (DICE), Rob Bridgett (Radical Entertainment), Kristoffer Mellroth (Microsoft Game Studio). It’s out hope that these will continue to fill in the relevant gaps of information between other articles, dev diary’s, and interviews out there and bring some new insights into the art of interactive sound.

If you have any examples of outstanding audio in games, or interesting techniques being used, please drop a line!

Special thanks to Michael Taylor for transcription of the interview which can be found over at the Game Audio Podcast. “Michael Taylor is an audio designer, composer and proficient tea-boy and can be found at www.stomp224.co.uk “

ShroomMan & BossShroom Artwork © Aaron Armstrong

Sound designer Michael Taylor has published an interesting article about his experience on porting audio from “Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath” (Xbox) to FMOD (for PC and PS3).

Welcome to the third instalment of the Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath Development Diary! In this edition, we will take a look at how we have been working on increasing the fidelity of the audio for the next generation!

To do the work we hired freelance sound designer Michael Taylor, who took on the task of going through the development  archives to find all the original audio by Michael Bross, and rebuilding it!

Continue reading…

Avid has just released Pro Tools 9, the new version of the industry standard DAW, now packed with more features (including very cool news for post-sound guys, both LE and HD users) and also a new philosophy (yes, finally… they’re “changing”).

So.. What’s new?

• Pro Tools now works with Core Audio and ASIO drivers (no more interface limitations)
• Supports OMF/AAF/XMF
• Adds native ADC
• Adds EUCON support
• Supports up to 96 tracks natively, and 512 tracks with Complete Production Toolkit 2 and Pro Tools HD

Several of the features of the previous toolkits are included natively in Pro Tools 9, such ast DigiBase Pro, Time Code Ruler, MP3 export, and more. There’s also the new Complete Production Toolkit 2, which adds HD features to Pro Tools 9:

• Exchange sessions with Pro Tools|HD users without ever losing session information
• Create huge mixes with up to 192 simultaneous audio tracks** on playback—512 total
• Get full VCA mixing capabilities and support for up to 64 video tracks
• Mix in 7.1 surround while monitoring in stereo with the Neyrinck SoundCode Stereo plug-in
• Speed up your workflow with advanced automation, audio, and video editing tools
• Shift time and pitch with natural-sounding results using the X-Form plug-in

Pro Tools 9 is available now at $599. Crossgrade from LE costs $249, and from HD to PT9HD costs $349. More info at Avid. Feature comparison here.

Some of the presentations and audio recordings of the Gamefest 2010 Audio panels are available now for download.

High fidelity meets deep interactivity in today’s top game audio implementations. Now take it to the next level, and learn about the wide array of technologies currently available to create, develop, manipulate, and render dynamic and immersive sound for your titles on Microsoft platforms. This track will cover the entire game audio implementation pipeline, from compression and input to real-time manipulation and processing, to mixing and final presentation to the user. Topics will include “Project Natal” audio features, the rich set of tools and libraries available for playback and processing of audio data, compression formats, and the shared challenges of developing audio on Xbox 360, Windows, and XNA Game Studio. Principally focused on the needs of professional audio programmers, composers, sound designers, and audio directors, this track also provides topics of interest to producers and game designers interested in making audio a more proactive element of their titles’ creative vision.

Download here…

Via: The Sonic Spread

Jeremy Peirson (JP) and Laurent Kossayan (LK), sound supervisors on Breck Eisner’s “The Crazies” took some time out of their schedule to rap about the sound design for the remake of George Romero’s 1973 horror film by the same name.

DS: 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.

DS: What was the workflow like for all the soldiers’ radio chatter and futz dialog? Was there lots of loop-group used for coverage? How much was production? What were some specific solider cues you had poke through the mix during some of the scenes?

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.

JP: We only recorded the orange and white bio-suit voices with the fireman’s oxygen and radio apparatus. It sounded very original and different from all of the more classic scuba type recordings. With the other lines, I created a few different treatments, mainly using speakerphone and futzbox, along with some other processing. There was a lot of material to work with and we had to process it all, so if we wanted a change, we didn’t have to wait for it to be processed, we could just audition it and then put into the movie.

There were only a few lines that really had to poke through, one of them being, “The crazies have broken through the containment zone…” We’d also want to hear a few “All Clears” and “Move it alongs”. The overall effect that we were going for was more of a busy activity and swarm of soldiers so the audience was always hearing these voices rather than the individual soldiers.

JP: The soldiers’ radio chatter was probably one of the single most important design concepts we had for this movie. The soldiers represent the threat to life as these people knew it. The trick was that we needed to have at least four different sound futzes, depending on the mask and color of the suit. We had soldiers with modified gas masks, people in the orange and white bio-suits and green suited bio-suit guards.

LK: We spent several weeks trying to find the right futzing; we eventually ended up requesting WB fire department to help us. Captain Finney came to the ADR stage with respirator mask and oxygen mask with tanks they use on the lot. We had the ADR loop group actors wear the masks and breathe through it. Breathing through the masks impacts the way you talk, so actors performed accordingly which gave it a special touch of authenticity.

DS: What was used for the sound of the pitchfork being dragged down the high school hallway? When was the idea of it bellowing down the hall conceived?

JP: I think from the script, the pitchfork was always supposed to be heard coming down the hall, and it was shot and edited with this in mind. We just followed the road map that was given to us. The sound of the pitchfork heard from a distance is actually a shovel and then it switches to the pitchfork once the principle and the sharp threat get close up. I wanted to have a sonic change from when you didn’t know what was coming to when you did.

LK: We tried everything from showls to pieces of metal of every type and believe it or not, I found this old rusty pitchfork abandoned in a friend’s garage, dragged it down their concrete alley, and the scraping of the metal resonated up to the handle incredibly. I recorded it on smooth concrete and we had found our pitchfork; it was surprisingly apple to apple.

DS: After searching your library for “explo – nuclear”, how did you approach the sound for the film’s “detonative” climax?

JP: The coolest thing about the ending explosion is the delay in the picture to when you hear it. It’s not very often you get to use that actual reality for movies, but in this case it worked extremely well. It allowed the truck to go by and then for everything to go quiet before BOOM! My approach to the nuke was to use a combination of actual explosions with more treated ones. The overall sound of the nuke was pretty layered, but tried to be as clear as possible by using different frequency ranges in the explosions. Between the boom, crunch, and the roar, I found ways to fill up the speakers and sell this enormous devastating weapon. I even got to use a sonic boom recording I captured from the space shuttle re-entering. I used some more synthy sounding explosions I made to give the nuke more character than just the classic boom and rumble.

It was also important to develop a blast wave to help sell the shock waves that end up overtaking the truck that our main characters are in. I went hunting for explosion recordings that had the shock wave or slap on them and maximized just that portion of them to help sell this effect. I used a series of rumbles, avalanches, earthquakes, and rock breaks for the final wave that overtakes the truck. Add in the tornado of debris and wind and this made for a fun sequence to work on.

DS: How was the map/computer telemetry conceptualized in the film? Did Breck have ideas of how the POV of the military machine should sound?

JP: The idea of the POV shots was that this is a jet flying overhead, doing recon, and less about some digital sounding satellite view. We have jet sounds, some military radio chatter, and even some cockpit breathing to help with this person-in-a- plane concept. The hardest part about these sequences was trying not to be too video game-like, or overly designed, in the sound fx. Breck really wanted an analog sounding machine-based system and not anything too digital sounding. I ended up using modified servos and camera motors for the zoom. The beeps were from older gear, nothing too high tech.

DS: The scene in the car wash seemed like it could be especially fun to work on, how did you guys cover it?

LK: One day I spent a few hours at a car wash recording car interiors. I ran my old Volvo 940 station wagon and a late model Ford Explorer through a couple times, micing the cabin in quad but also holding a shotgun to follow any specific details while the brushes attacked the cars. The station wagon’s long, thin body sounded great going through the wash while the SUV had a heavier feel to it. I had a lot of fun and the gas station attendant didn’t understand why I kept washing my car.

DS: How was sound used to punctuate scares in “the crazies” (whether with dynamic range or otherwise) and what clichés can and can’t be avoided for their effectiveness in the genre?

JP: We used sound to help propel us through the movie by banging into scenes with a loud sound or going quiet before unleashing a shocking sound. This may be all cliché, but in this type of movie and the way it was conceived allowed for this to work. Lulling the audience into a sense of calm before scaring them works really effectively in horror movies. Music hits and stings also played a role in these shocking moments. One trick I’ve learned is to layer the shocks with more than just a low end stinger, but I also like to use a high pitch reverse female scream to sharpen the shock. Even a few frames can add a new dimension to a stinger.
As to what clichés can and can’t be avoided, I’m not sure how to answer that exactly. It’s been my experience that some people seem to have this idea that all movies have to abide by a set of rules. Dialogue here, foley here, etc. But what we are doing is completely artistic in nature and defined by what the movie and our filmmakers need. To say that we can’t do that because it’s just not done anymore seems limiting. Why not try everything and see what works?

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!

Here is a great talk I had with Michael Kamper, Audio Lead of BioShock 2. Let’s read:

Designing Sound: Hi Michael, first of all would be great to hear something about your career… How you get started with sound design? And how do you get involved with the video games industry?

Michael Kamper: I was always fascinated by how movies were made and I would always watch the “making of” programs that, at the time, would air on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service, a non-profit broadcasting television service in the US). I had taped a few and watched them more than I would watch the movie themselves. This is where I first learned about people like Ben Burtt and Gary Rydstrom and that someone could actually make a living making noise for movies.

I was fortunate enough to attend a high school that had its own student run radio station. My mother wanted me to take a summer school class before my freshman year to give me a head start, so I took the radio production class. In my sophomore year I started producing radio dramas starting with the scripts for the original BBC version of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. I also adapted the “Batman” movie from 1968 and “The Breakfast Club” into radio dramas, casting my friends in the parts and spending countless weekends in the school’s studio cutting them all together using a 2-Track machine and carts. For sound design, I used tracks from old sound effects records, sfx from music albums, and even dialing in small amounts of feedback through the old mixing board to produce reverb.

I went to college initially to continue my work in radio but I soon moved over to film, realizing I could combine my two loves; making movies and making noise into an actual career. I graduated from Columbia College in Chicago with a degree in Film Sound and moved out to Southern California.

My first audio job was an intern at the now defunct EFX Studios in Burbank. There I met an amazing group of designers who basically taught me everything I know about sound design. They were still using the Synclavier system for sfx at the time and just beginning to use the original Sound Designer program and early iterations of Pro Tools. I was eventually able to get up to speed and started cutting on some movies and TV shows.

EFX was also one of the first studios doing audio for video games. They worked a lot with Charles Deenen and Interplay. The first game I worked on there was “Heavy Gear 2” for Activision. After that, I did a lot of game audio asset creation and always found it to be a nice change of pace from doing linear editing for pictures.

After about 10 years in Hollywood, I felt like I needed a change of pace and some new challenges in my career. Luckily, Greg Allen, a friend who had hired me as a contractor was looking to add an Audio Lead to his team at EA Chicago. It seemed to be the perfect fit so I jumped at it. Unfortunately, EA Chicago closed a year later but I managed to land at 2K Marin as they were staffing up for “BioShock 2”.

DS: How was the relationship with all the development team? How long was the development cycle of BioShock 2?

MK: I had a great relationship with the rest of the dev team. I worked very closely with the other leads but also had a lot of creative freedom in terms of developing the guidelines for the soundscape for the game. I also worked closely with our Creative Director, Jordan Thomas, in helping to shape our score with our fabulous composer, Garry Schyman.

The development cycle was roughly two years; counting all the preliminary work that went into the game, although in the beginning, we also had to cope with forming a new studio, as well as most of the tech team working on the PS3 version of the first game.

DS: How did the art concept and the story of the game influenced you and the team to create and lead the sound?

MK: Certainly, the fact that the game was going to be set 10 years after the first BioShock established the atmosphere of BioShock 2. I really wanted the ambience to sell the fact that Rapture was constantly falling apart around the player. We put a lot of creaking and groaning throughout the backgrounds.

As you progress, you are also getting closer and closer to Lamb’s (the main antagonist of the game) domain. The audio in that level has a lot of weird non-diegetic sounds that really play off the insanity of the Splicers. We took those elements and stretched them backwards through the game so the player slowly encounters more and more of those elements, illustrating how “infected” the world around the player is becoming.

DS: There is a hard emotional factor on the storytelling in BioShock. Did you use any special technique or element to help on this aspect?

MK: I tried to compliment the emotional strings that run throughout the story with the music implementation. Garry Schyman produced an absolutely amazing score for us and he provided me a lot of material to play with. The main theme was in the first track that he created and it evoked such a perfect sense of loneliness and longing that it absolutely mirrored the struggle that Delta and Eleanor are feeling as they try to reunite.

Garry was able to provide the separate tracks for me to that piece and I was able to use those throughout the game as a leitmotif in a way. I used the very beginning of the track during the opening cutscene, using the violin as young Eleanor’s “voice”. During Delta’s first ocean walk, I used only the cello portion. After Eleanor’s first extended telepathic communication with Delta, you can hear a portion of the violin trailing away in the background, like it’s the echo of the pair-bond moment you just shared.

After establishing this, I then used bits of the violin and cello for the Save and Harvest moments that Delta does during the game.

The culmination of this musical thread through the game comes as the track is used during the ambiguous ending where the whole track finally plays out; picking up where it left off from the opening cutscene. It is such a beautiful piece and, being the theme of our game, I wanted to make sure it became an emotional thread that spanned the journey that both Eleanor and Delta are on.

DS: Being a sequel, what are the new challenges on the sound of the game?

MK: We certainly had to live up to the beautiful job that everyone did on the first game. BioShock had been so lauded for its audio that it was a little intimidating taking this project on. Except for Sound Designer Justin Mullins down in 2K Australia, none of us had worked on the first BioShock, so we were all basically coming into the project as fans of the first game. Our goal, though, was to do our best to service the game and story we had in front of us and provide the best damn sound job we could for BioShock 2.

DS: One interesting aspect in BioShock 2 is that the player now has the role of Big Daddy from the beginning of the game, and you have the ability to use two hands, new weapons, plasmids, etc… How the sound team dealt with this new main character?

MK: It certainly was a challenge to make the player really feel like he was some flavor of Big Daddy. They had been established as these huge, slow-moving creatures in the first game and if we had tried to stay true to that version of the character, it would have gotten really annoying for the player. I went back and forth a lot on the footsteps and the sounds of movement to help sell the size of Delta to the player and I think I ended up in a pretty good place with it.

Another thing that was important to me in selling who you are is the effect reaction sounds have on the helmet; bullets, melee hits, and even the water drips pinging on the metal of Delta’s helmet, these are all important aspects of the audio that help the player buy into who they are as they move through the game.

DS: I love the ambiences of the game. You really feel in a deep, dark and creepy place…the underwater scenes are also great. How were they created? How was the recording and creation of those new environments?

MK: I don’t believe any new ambiences were specifically recorded for the game. We did, however, have a great background sound system implemented by our Audio Programmer, Guy Somberg. It allowed for multiple stereo streams to be placed on the player, depending on the room they were currently in, as well as taking a selection of mono sounds and randomly playing them in different zones around the player. We could preview all of this from the tool and quickly find the right ambient qualities we wanted for the various spaces around the levels. This allowed us to quickly iterate on our ambiences and implement them into the levels with ease, and helped create the randomness I was looking for in the background effects.

DS: The new multiplayer mode also comes with new features, such as specific plasmids, environments, etc. In terms of sound… what were the most difficult feature to develop?

MK: Our multiplayer audio was produced with the rest of the game up at Digital Extremes by George Spanos, who did an amazing job. I gave him a lot of feedback on his work and I think the biggest challenge was simply making sure that there was a certain amount of cohesion between our projects. In a lot of ways, he had the unenviable task of duplicating a lot of the feel of the first BioShock since multiplayer takes place closer to that period. He really did a great job and the audio really helps bring the player right back to that experience making it feel like it lives in the same world.

DS: The dialogue on BioShock is always fantastic. There are different types of effects on the voices, such as the Little Sister’s voice, Big Daddy’s growl, the ghosts’ scenes, etc. How was the sound processing there?

MK: For the first game, all of the dialogue processing was developed as a series of batch processing presets in Sound Forge. For BioShock 2, we did our best to replicate what they had done so there was some consistency between the two games in this regard. Various EQs, reverbs, reverse reverbs, distortions, and other effects were used. We also had to make the processing as simplified as possible so that our localization team located in Windsor could easily duplicate what we had done so that the game sounded as similar as possible across all the languages.

DS: What were the main tools used by the team for creating the sound of the game?

MK: Myself, Senior Sound Designer David Steinwedel, and Dialogue Supervisor Michael Csurics mostly used ProTools and Sound Forge for asset creation and manipulation. Our sound design contractor Andy Lackey used Nuendo. I, basically, gave everyone a choice of what tools they were most comfortable with, I didn’t want to dictate what they should be using and potentially limit their creativity. As long as they produced great sounding assets, it wasn’t really important to me what they were using.

DS: Could you tell us some field recording stories? Could you share some info about the sound sources recorded for the main elements of the game (i.e., characters, weapons, plasmids, ambiences)

MK: I hired David Farmer, a really great sound designer (who has created a lot of wonderful vocal elements for many films) to design the Big Sister vocals. After I had found the general sound that I wanted from the bird and hyena recordings, David went off and played with a number of different types of sources and plug-ins. I provided him with a bunch of my own sources, including a full recording of my wife doing a number of dolphin-like emotive calls covering all the different kinds of reactions we wanted the Big Sister to have.

David eventually produced numerous layers of vocals that had been processed about 10 different ways in this massive Pro Tools session. I was able to take those layers and mix them down into the final Big Sister vocals. All those layers really provided me with a dynamic pallet to choose from that allowed me to create the various emotive calls and shrieks that ended up in the final game.

DS: And finally… what about the implementation and the audio engine?

MK: We used the FMod sound system for our basic audio engine and FMod’s designer tools for event creation. Guy created a wonderful collection of tools that greatly enhanced the implementation process. On top of the background tool as previously mentioned, he also made a really wonderful Mix System that allowed us to use a lot of dynamic in-game mixing, as well as a number of effects and randomization tools that saved us a lot of time and memory in the long run.

Blastwave FX and Avid announced a new Sound Design Competition with the chance to win more than $12.000 on Avid/Blastwave FX products.

RULES

• Submit: A 0:30 – 0:45 second video with stereo soundtrack. The total length should include the intro and outro video clips provided in the Competition Download Pack.
• You must use at least three sound effects from the competition download pack. You may process and distort these effects, but they must be somewhat recognizable.
• The intro and outro video clips must be used, and we encourage you to sound design them.
• Entries can be any style: real/surreal, with or without dialogue, with live actors, documentary style interviews, motion graphics, animation, etc. Some participants will inevitably disagree with the wide-open format, but we want to encourage as much outside-the-box thinking and creativity as possible.
• If you are one of the top twenty finalists, we will request the original Quicktime video.
• The one winner will receive a Turnkey Post System (see Info section above).
• Participants release all ownership rights related to their audio/video to Avid and Blastwave FX.
• Participants’ names will be withheld from judges.

HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR ENTRY

• Upload video to You Tube.
• Include “Blastwave FX and Avid Competition” and your name in the title.
• Email the URL link to competition@blastwavefx.com with “Competition Link” in the subject line. You will receive a confirmation email within five days upon submitting.

SPECS

• Audio: 16-bit 48 kHz or 44.1 kHz stereo .wav file.
  Video: H.264, 1280 x 720, 29.97 FPS, Quicktime

JUDGES

• Skip Lievsay
• Jacob Ribicoff
• Ric Viers

JUDGING CRITERIA

• How well the soundtrack supports the video or the video supports the soundtrack.
• Exemplification of the question, “What is the role of sound for picture?”
• Structure and flow from beginning to end.
• The judges will evaluate the intro, outro, and everything in between.

PRIZES

Grand Prize (Need to submit an entry to the competition and get the 1st place)

• Avid Media Composer
• Mbox and Pro Tools LE
• Blastwave FX Sonopedia Library
• The Sound Effects Bible
• DV Toolkit 2

Giveaway Prizes (just need to register on the competition) (2 Winners)

• Mbox Mini and Pro Tools LE
• Blastwave FX WavFX Library
• 2 Blastwave FX Download Packs
• The Sound Effects Bible
• DV Toolkit 2

DEADLINE

• Submit entries by April 20, 2010
• The winners will be announced on May 5, 2010.
• The Winner must be prepared to describe how they created their entry, such as what kinds of editing software and plug-ins were used, where they acquired the video footage, etc.