Here are the answers to the questions you made to Charles Deenen. Even if you don’t made any question to him, you could find really great infromation related to different topics.

(some questions are combined and/or edited down)

Designing Sound Readers: 1a. Every single company I look at, and every website I go to always says the same thing; “Applicants must have at least 3 years experience in the field of Sound Design” and leads me to my question: How are you meant to “start” a career in Sound Design when every single place you look tells you that 3 years experience is needed. How did the people who work for these companies get their first job without the 3 years? I mean you can’t have 3 years experience. . . if every job (even your first) needs 3 years experience to actually get into!
Any advice for someone like me who is seemingly staring into a black hole of nothingness.

1b. I understand I could do freelance work. How would I go about becoming a recognized freelancer though? How do you become freelance? Is there an organisation that you become a member of that allows people looking for small Sound Design jobs to select you from a catalogue?

1c. I’m very intensely serious about becoming a sound designer, I’m working with an indie dev. team, and am paying a very healthy sum of money to attend an audio production school. When I get out of this school, how do you suggest I start looking for my first professional gig? doing sound design for commercials, or even cell phone GUIs, or just any gig that will pay me to make sound. Are there any like, job boards just for sound designers?

Charles Deenen: You’re asking the holy grail of questions :) The first question I think is “how is my work going to get noticed and liked enough for me to get hired”. My advice stems from how I hire new freelancers. This might be very different from other people though.

Often I’ll look for videos on youtube, vimeo and other places for new and exciting ways that people have used sound. Usually they’re easy to find, especially if people have commented about the use of sound. Then I’ll contact them and see if they’re open for a test or some small freelance work.

Another way I hire freelancers is when they send me some work to look at it, without being pushy. After several times, something might catch my eye and will keep it in the back of my mind for a future project. Don’t be pushed off though by the “3 year experience” phrase. The work will speak for yourself. If your work rocks, the developer or post-house would be crazy not to hire you. Tools and processes can be taught, but talent is hard to brew.

Sadly, human resources will indeed filter your resume by the experience, so find new and creative ways to get the Audio Director/Lead to look at your work. Maybe even have them give you a specific task to do, so you can show off your work when given direction. This will show how you interpret direction. If time is critical, I have to admit I usually will go back to proven sources and/or word of mouth recommendations.

A catalog of sound-designers? I don’t know of any website or book that would be a catalog of sound designers. There are some organizations like the MPSE and unions that could maybe assist with this. Sounds like a great idea for somebody to make a site with demo-reels from sound designers. Would save a lot of hassle trying to find the right person.

DSR: 2a. Congratulations for your work on the NFS franchise, Shift is one of my favorite games! How you record those cars and all the noises of them? 
2b. Last week I recorded some engines and general cars sounds. I was satisfied with the work done on some recordings, but I had problems with other sounds. I can’t get the “heart” of the engine, maybe I’m missing something… So my question is: can you share some techniques you use on cars/engine audio recording? Is there a way to position the microphones to get better sounding engines?

2c. What mics you use for cars recording?

CD: Howdy, and thanks for the support on the NFS games. NFS Shift and all the other NFS games are the work of a team of people, but I’ll try to answer this for the team; Most of this is captured in the two “Need for Speed” articles that we just did on this site. We record cars in various ways, but we get some of the best results when doing it on the road vs. clinical environments with dynos etc. We also look for cars that have a lot more “bite” and pressure level vs. stock cars, Skids are done in a similar way, except we use the opposite car; a very quiet car with various tires, various surfaces in hopes to get the perfect artifacty squeel. Beyond that we got turbos, transmission whine, wind-noise, air-movement. All these get recorded in the traditional way, with lav & condenser mics near the sources. Most gets recorded onto Sound Devices 744T’s. We usually hire some of the best recordists to ensure the process runs smooth, and that owners leave happy. Hopefully the NFS articles answer most of your questions. If not, feel free to shoot me an email.

Regarding positioning mics; Without knowing what car, what mics, and what locations you tried already, this is hard to answer. I know this sounds cheezy, but use your ears, and learn what the characteristics are for each mic you use. Take your wind-shielded lav (MKE2’s and/or Audio Technica’s are common due to their ability to withstand high pressure level), and place it in several spots on the car, repeating the same movement. You’ll quickly learn what location that mic works best. When listening to the engine, you’ll notice there are locations with build-ups of “noise” (bad), and build-ups of tonality (good). Watch out for hot parts though! On the exhaust, we’ve noticed that placing it too close to the exhaust will get you a lot of air-movement, but little tone. Again, it’s critical that you find the location that will extrude the most amount of “tone”, and the least amount of “noise”. Practice, test, experiment, and learn.

Besides the aforementioned lav mics we use a plethora of other mics (neuman 191, SM57, 421, D112, Sennheiser MK’s etc.). But often its much more important on where to place it, then what mic to use. Placement for getting that aforementioned tonality, and resistance to wind is the most critical issue. Placement of mics comes from experience in regards to acoustics and aerodynamics, and having made many mistakes. If it makes you feel better, I still not happy with my results either.

DSR: 3a: Hey charles good job on the soundminer video, really great to see how you can get a great sound effect so fast. I see you use a lot of plugins there… Could you share more information about some of the best plugins you use for your projects (not the video)?

3b: Your video on sound design with soundminer is superb! You have a lot of effects there. I wonder how you know what effect has to be there? Any method to identify what could be the best plugin or the best structure to use in a chain? I already have some experience on that, but watching that video I get a little confused seeing some effects I don’t use and could help me a lot in the future.

CD: I’m going to try to answer these both at once. You got a few hours? There’s a HUGE list of plugs I use and love, but I’m still not the king of plugins. But I’m close to becoming the kings’ servant though :) Honestly, all kidding aside, I use whatever solves the problem. I naturally have a few “reach for” plugins like:

• Waves L1, Ren-compressor, Rbass, Z-noise & Mondomod
• Soundtoys Filterfreak, Soundblender & Phasemistriss
• Digidesign Lo-fi, recti-fi and d-verb (yes, d-verb for it nasty bad reverbs)
• A ton of the McDSP plugs like ML4000, Filterbank and Analog channel

Other plugins I reach for are the full GRM set, Eventide set (love their H3000 factory), Alitiverb, various granulators (KT granulator etc.), Avox warming plugin, PSP plugs etc.

The process usually is to reach for what I know, and if that doesn’t solve the problem, I reach for others. On the VST side, I try out at least 1-2 new ones every week or so, and sometimes run into some great gems. I visit some websites like KVRaudio.com, and find some new gems there occasionally.

However, plugins are tools. Tools to manipulate sounds which become part of a soundscape. All the plugins in the world won’t help you build a soundscape, but that’s quite obvious. Treat your plugins as your tools, learn what the tools do, so you can spend more time being creative with your sound editing. Knowing what effects to use stems from knowing your tools. You wouldn’t reach for a hammer when a saw is needed right? Often its also about experimenting, doing things you normally wouldn’t do. The answer to your question is not a straightforward one, but please read the section in my first interview on this site about the 3-day test I did to myself. Try to recreate somebody else’s sound with only a handful of sounds. You’re going to have to rely heavily on processing, and you’ll find a thousand ways of how -not- to achieve the result. But at the same time you’ll learn a thousand ways on how to get a different sound than expected. That experience will carry forward in you knowing what to use, when and where.

DSR: 4. I’m studying sound some time ago, everything by myself, with books, websites and practice (There are no sound schools in my country). Lately I’ve been working on some projects (redesigning videos) and feel I have already a good material to show. Now what worries me is how to get hired on a company without having “official” study. What you could advise me? What do you think would be the best way to get into the industry?

CD: We seem to be in the same boat, I haven’t had any formal study either, so never let that block your way. Just like question #1’s answer, the key to it all is to have will-power, and find ways to show your talent. In the early days it was much harder to reach everybody, but now with the internet you can show your talents to everybody, and send out links easily. Before you try to send your video to companies, audio directors and sound supervisors, get feedback, lots of feedback. There are several groups (like the yahoo sound_design group) where people are very open to share their feedback on your work. Learn from that feedback (especially the ones which request improvement), and resubmit. You learn from the mistakes, and mistakes will make you grow. Often you have to go through a hundred mistakes before you reach the solution.

2nd, before sending it out, really do a gut-check and question if your work can compete against the majority of productions out there in a commercial world. If not, maybe time to go back to the table, and research what you can improve. In my time I’ve met a fair number of sound designers who became “cocky”. They thought their work was amazing, simply due to the sheer amount of time they had put into their work, or the sophisticated differentiation they provided with their work. They forgot to check however if the work stood up against the “expected” norm for a commercial release. Their work might have been awesome in terms of an art-school project, but maybe too strange.

Also, the accompanying note can tell a lot about the person. During the 90‘s somebody send me a piece of sound design done solely on a violin. He plucked it, scraped it, banged on it etc. and in the end it simply wasn’t fun to listen to and plainly annoying. His letter stated it was the best work he’d ever done. If he had stated it was an experiment showing off what he can do with manipulation (which was awesome), we probably would have asked for a 2nd demo.

To better answer this, I forwarded the question to Tristan Beulah (one of EA’s new young sound designers) about how he got into the industry and give a different spin on an answer; “Even within the sound industry there are niches. As with any industry, the trick is to find out what makes you stand out and leverage that to your advantage. Work on your primary skills and demonstrate them in the best light possible. You obviously don’t want to end up as a one-trick-pony, so improve wherever you can. The idea is just to figure out what makes you you, and find out where you can slot in, then go for it.

Cut down on the clutter: select your best works and put those in an easy to navigate portfolio. Don’t make it a chore for prospective employers and clients to find you and decide you are exactly what they are looking for. A web address is a lot easier to distribute than DVDs, too, so if you don’t have a website, you might want to start there.

Also, like any industry, you need to meet the people you’re trying to work with. That means directors, sound designers, studio managers, whoever. The majority of my peers just getting into the industry are making strides through acquaintances, not cold calling. Find sound related events, film related events, projects you can contribute to, anything that puts you in front of the people you want to work with. There’s no risk in putting yourself out there and making an impression. Don’t be a nuisance, just be a passionate sound designer and try to find projects you want to work on. Make friends in the industry. With experience, and time, you’ll work your way into the industry.”

DSR: 5. I can see you work with proprietary software at EA. Do you use middleware solutions such as Wwise and FMOD? What are the advantages you find to work with your own software?

CD: I personally don’t really use any 3rd party middleware for commercial projects, but several projects at EA do. I’ve experimented with them during my free time to see what the buzz is about. Usually the manufacturers have to make the 3rd party software super user-friendly, and fill the common feature-set. They usually can’t get to the specialized tasks that certain games require. The advantages of our own software is within that boundary. We can write it in a way it’s optimized for the game, does specialized processing techniques, and in general is more CPU friendly than “general” packages.

DSR: 6a. Hello Charles, thanks for the articles. Loving your special a lot. I was wondering if you can share some mixing tips to get great sound on cinematics.

6b. NFS trailers/teasers have really crazy cuts between different scenes. Do you know about a technique or tips to deal with that kind of videos?

CD: Great questions. Apologies that my answer won’t be great and probably something you’ve heard before. What you’re asking has to stem from doing; analyzing other people’s work, acquire (honest) feedback from people who’s work you respect, and improve. The basic tips on doing fast cut cinematics and trailers would be:

• Work with your picture editor to have him/her edit the picture to a pace. Regardless if that pace is music and/or soundeffects, they get inspired by the pacing of the sound, just like you’ll get inspired by the pacing of the picture. Without a picture editor who really knows how to use sound, sound intensity and pacing, you’ll always be stuck playing second fiddle trying to make something out of nothing.
• Work with your picture editor to build up trust. We often get the video, and will re-edit it a bit in protools to match pacing of a crescendo, breathing room, beat-cut or similar. Then we give the OMF or edit-list back to the editor to conform picture to.
• Don’t cut every sound that you see. When you watch the video the fist time, quickly speak out, or write-down what you were focusing on, and only highlight that sound. Those are the main sounds to work on.
• Then on pass 2, figure out where sound can provide enhancement; can it enhance the story, the pacing, the contra-feel etc. Any way to enhance the music? Are the hits big enough, are there holes which require FX support? are the drums sharp enough? etc.
• Pass 3: figure out which soundeffects can be tied together. It’s easy to edit a sound in for a car-by, followed by a wipe, but can you find a way to combine the 2 into a seamless sound so it won’t feel so choppy? Never edit exactly “on the cut”. You’ll find it often plays much better if you don’t attach to picture too closely, but instead ramp in and out. Move the sound out of the picture, don’t just stop it (unless it’s for an “effect”)
• Pass 4: figure out where you get bored. Are you providing enough intensity build-ups, does the video leave you wanting more? Is your heart beating just a tad bit faster? (this means that intensity build-ups were working) Do you find yourself breathing different while watching it? (if so, you probably provided enough gaps, valley and peaks)
• Pass 5: toss out anything not needed, especially sounds which are just noise. Less is more.

That’ll get you started with the general stuff. As always, listen and learn from other people’s work, then clearly figure out what sets your work apart, and how you can sell your skills.

DSR: 7. What could you recommend me to improve my sound design skills? Any practice or method to analyze or remake the sound?

CD: For this, lets go back to the first interview where I mentioned the 3 day test I put myself through. The best way I’ve improved on my sound design is by constant practice and tryouts, learning from peers and mentors and pushing myself:

• Know and learn your sounds/library, and what they represent in real life
• Go out and record new material. This will not only get you new source, but also exposes you to the real world. You’ll get to appreciate what happens to sound when it travels; air distortion, pitch-bending, phasing etc.
• Pick one of your most favorite sounds. Now pick 5 sounds from your library in random, 1 from each category (i.e. kitchen, gun, ambience, vehicle etc.). Then try to make that favorite sound from ONLY the picked 5 sounds. This will make you learn how to do processing. Don’t give up. Do this at least for 3 days. Again, it’s not important if you get the perfect result, but what is important is all the ways you found how to apply processing, and get to your learn what your plugins do.
• Now learn how to create movement. Listen carefully to real world movement (car by’s, jet by’s etc.). Then try to create that movement using your plugs, and bit of other sounds on your own sounds.
• Last but not least, and this is the harder one. Grab a video from somewhere that inspires you. Redo the sound, but give it your personal twist, and get feedback. Honest feedback. Find your harshest critic who you admire. The feedback might be painful, but improve, redo, and continue.

DSR: 8. I made some sound remakes to trailers and animations. I realized that the hardest thing is to evaluate yourself and see what are your mistakes… Could you list some of the most important things to analyze from a sound design reel or example?

CD: When I listen to somebody’s sound design reel I watch for a few things:

• Originality. Does it sound new, refreshing, or is it the same old stuff
• Clarity; does the sound designer understand the difference between simply placing a sound to picture, and placing it to picture for a reason.
• Does the sound designer really understand how to make a clear, clean sound-bed, without creating a wall of noise, or elements which “stick out” as improper.
• What are the mixing-skills, and musical skills of the sound designer. Do they understand musical timing, valleys, peak and musical tonality.

When evaluating yourself, compare your work to others’ who you admire, back to back. You’ll always find ways to improve. Sooner or later you’ll find that you don’t have to compare anymore, or can’t find anything really wrong anymore. That’s when you know you’re getting better (I’ve yet to come to that stage :)

Your work is never better or worse than somebody else’s, just different. It’s up to you to find out what the consumers click with. That’s what you’re really learning, and for all we know, you’ll come up with the next new sound-scape for others to learn from.

DSR: 9. Sometimes a sound completely stumps me and I have no idea how to make it, or even what to start with. When this happens to you, what do you do?

CD: AHA! Great to hear I’m not the only one. Welcome to the club of reality :) If I don’t have any ideas, I jump out of windows, take a dive of the empire state building, and swim on the bottom of the ocean… kidding aside, it happens to all of us. But I do have some methods to help me get ideas.

• If you have an example file you’re trying to emulate, Dissect. Dissect. Focus in on each frequency band, and try to figure out what’s happening there. Play the sound back at half-speed or even quarter speed. This will tell you a lot of info.
• When starting on a new sound, I often start randomly playing sounds in a library program like soundminer, and toss in some plugs, move the pitch, activate reversinator plugin etc. You’re looking for inspiration of a sound that moves you. You’ll hear it when you hear it. When I’m completely out of ideas, I’ll simply start putting random things to picture, and sometimes you bump upon something that really works well. Once that happens, your inspiration will take you further, and you’ll shape it. It usually is that first hump you have to get around. Most of the time that original sound that inspired you to begin with doesn’t even survive the cut.
• Hum/sing it a sound into a microphone, and then process that. Sometimes you can make the sound better with your mouth than you can find it in a lib, especially if they are surreal sounds.
• Use the peers around you. Talk to them, show them the picture and get ideas on what they would do. Sooner or later one of them will give you a route you hadn’t thought about which will totally inspire you.
• Acquisition of new sounds. Sometimes it just takes a few new sounds to get you inspired when you hear a certain element. Either record or buy a commercial library. Several sites (or so I heard) also provide free sounds. So there should be a plethora of sources to get you going.

Hopefully some of this was helpful. You can always reach me by email, facebook or linked-in if you have any further questions. I hope you had fun reading the articles this month. Cheers !

-charles

For years, Charles Deenen has been the audio director of the Need for Speed Franchise. I had a nice talk with him commenting about some aspects of the audio of the award winning franchise. Let’s read:

Designing Sound: First of all, tell us something about your passion for cars, and what you enjoy most about working on Need For Speed Games?

Charles Deenen: As a kid I played a lot with toy cars, build lego race-tracks and liked anything associated with speed. In the netherlands you can’t start your education for a drivers license until you’re 18. Before I started that, I got my speed-kick out of BMX biking, competing and doing jumps too high for my own health (the hole in my tongue is witness of that :) Oddly enough I’d always told my family I wasn’t ever going to drive a car. I’d seen one burn down during younger years, and was afraid I’d get burned alive in a crash. But hey, that fear didn’t last long, and I obtained my drivers license quickly and have always driven with a lead-foot.

Before “Need for Speed”, I’d never worked on a “big” racing game. Previously I’d worked on some C64 and SNES racing titles, but in those days sound was a low priority in a racing game. Heck, we were happy enough it made some tolerable sound.

On the Need for Speed franchise I’ve always enjoyed the people I work with the most. Without a team driving each other to excel, you don’t get industry leading results. We’re blessed to have that team in place. The execs at EA understand what great audio brings to a title and support the development of it. The other aspect I enjoy is the constant drive to find new and better ways to give the user a true car racing experience. This includes the plethora of cars we have to record (and sometimes get to drive :) which is always a really fun but exhausting time during the dev-cycle of a title. Having worked for many years on slower RPG style games, the racing genre changes up the pace nicely by introducing constant action.

DS: How has the evolution of the franchise been? What are the main improvements on the game since the first version?

CD: Need for Speed has been around for over 16 years(!!), and the very first version was 1994’s “need for speed” on the 3DO, with audio by Allistair Hirst. A lot has changed since then, but the platforms are so different, it’s hard to compare what the main improvements are. The previous games always have sounded great for the platform limits. The new consoles have allowed expansion of the realism of the sound, and provide a more engaging and believable soundscape. New playback techniques got introduced during 2004 on NFS Underground 2. Air distortion, split engines and environment integration were introduced in 2007. We’re now working on something that will bring it to another level by making the car come alive, which I’m very exciting about. No other game has done this yet. When this gets released it’ll be another few years hopefully before the competition will catch up.

(Sound by EA Media Works)

DS: How is the relationship of the sound team with the rest of the developers of NFS? How is the importance given to the sound of the games?

CD: The development team and NFS management realizes that Audio is a critical part of a racing game, and supports it. The audio artists and audio programmers are among the development team, and interact daily with the rest of the team. In other words, there’s no real separation between “sound team” and “dev team”. Everybody is part of the whole team.

DS: What techniques or methods you use on the game to enhance the player experience and provide realism/emotion with sound?

CD: Over the years we’ve tried several methods. Some that worked well, some that didn’t. Through all this we noticed a few interesting points. First off, the consumer thinks they know what a great race-car sounds like after listening to youtube clips. 2nd, the consumer still listens to racing games mostly on TV’s at low volume. As much as us developers want to believe they listen to games at higher volumes in 5.1, it simply isn’t the norm. Over the years we’ve changed our ways and style of mixing (using our advanced fully automated mixer), and tried out new techniques of sound reproduction. Some methods tried to make the experience go towards a movie by focusing on the most predominant sound requirement (i.e. focused mixing), while other methods involved a more defined car experience or putting you in the world. Music and dialog treatments have gone through several phases as well, with cop dialog being some of most believable you’ll hear in games (as mentioned by other people). All in all, we tried out a bunch, focus-tested, and then awaited the consumer’s response. Not all stuck :) What did stick are the elements which made the consumer less aware of audio as part of the game. The more audio works together with the experience, the better the result. The moment the consumer notices audio, it starts to work against the game experience. This all ties back to one of the articles we touched upon before; the believability gap. Audio can be a major offender in that area. How often have you heard a song stop/start on a racing game with “radio station” music treatment? It takes away from the smooth gameplay experience since you notice the audio being a layer on top of the game.

So instead of focusing on the latest cool audio techniques, we’ve gone back to the basics for future titles. The goal is that users won’t notice audio, but the moment they play the game silent, they notice their experience diminishing greatly, or even impossible.

DS: You also worked on Fast And Furious films… Any influence of NFS there? Did you learned something on the films that you implemented on NFS later?

CD: The fast and furious films were all about hot (tuner) cars, flashy body-kits, neon etc. It was a car culture considered very hip during the early 2000’s. Naturally NFS follows, and sometimes trend-sets this culture. During “underground” and “most wanted” NFS’s, there was quite a bit of audible cross pollination between NFS and the furious films. Even if I hadn’t worked on both, this would have most likely happened, simply due to the culture cross-overs.

What I learned during the Fast/Furious films was how to create the emotion of car sounds projected by other sounds. We used a plethora of bears, pigs, tigers, leopards etc. to enhance cars in a layered, or sometimes standalone way. Each character in the film got their own “treatment” and style. On the NFS side, we always started with the car recordings as a base, but on cinematic moments we’d enhance them with various other layers. During the early 2000‘s we used to go for animals and metal. Now we’re more into the distortion/synth sweeteners as you might have heard in the cinematics of NFS Shift.

Also when working with some great sound designers/editors in the world, you always pickup new ways and techniques of creating sound, which naturally get used in future titles.

DS I think you’ve had a lot of fun recording all the cars stuff (engine, inside car, skid noises, impacts, etc) for the game?…Could you share some experiences on that?

CD: We’ve had a lot of fun on all these recordings. They are some of the best times we have on a project. Over the years we’ve changed our recording techniques in search of methods which made the cars come alive. We used to record cars by placing them on on a dynamometer, but this gave us a pretty “stale” lifeless sound (perfect for programatic, scientific cars though :) Now most of our recordings are done on a track, with dyno recordings filling in some gaps. We employ some of the best car recordist to ensure we get the result we need as there’s only 1 opportunity at times. As always it’s a team effort.

For NFS we’ve recorded 150+ cars, anything from regular to high end 1 million dollar race-cars. Each of those is a new experience as you always have to find the optimum recording spots. Besides that we’ve done car crash recordings in multiple ways, several sessions of skid recordings, road surfaces, bumps, turbos, rattles etc. You name it on a car, and we probably recorded it.

There are a few sessions that always stick out as really fun or interesting. One of them being the “Touge” research. For one of the NFS, we added a mode which was a craze in japan called Touge. It involved going through mountain roads incredibly fast, drifting the cars. We hooked up with a crazy touge driver in L.A and recorded a lot of reference material, both onboards as well as exterior. Lets say that a human is not meant to go so fast on those mountain roads. It was absolutely insane. The dozens of skid-marks on the road, trailing into the deep valley are proof of that. Too many got into accidents there.

Another fun trip was a few days of recording at Sebring. Jesse Lyon connected with a few racing teams running in the GT1 class like the Corvette Racing team and we ended up having full access to their cars for a day each. We were initially not prepared for 130+db cars. These were the loudest cars I’d ever heard. However, John Fasal pulled a few tricks out of his sleeve and we ended up recording 3 magnificent cars those days with a team of 4 people.

Everybody loves crashes. We’ve done several crash recordings, but the most elaborate one has been the hiring of a construction crane, dropping cars 100 foot down. We went through about 15 cars that day, and dropped anything from cars, vans, huge cement blocks to metal beams onto various items. Every time we did this, we stuck an SM57 in the middle of the crash, at impact point, thinking it would die after 1 time. After 40+ drops the SM57 had a minor scratch on it. Go figure. It simply didn’t want to get killed.

DS: And what about the ambiences?

CD: We do ambience recordings when needed as NFS isn’t an ambience heavy game. We’ve been to many race-tracks, city races, drag-races, drifts, bridges, tunnels and other locations that we’re set for some time to come.

DS: I love the cinematics of every NFS. You directed some of them, so how is the sound design approach on that animations?

CD: The cinematics are always done by a team of people, and on most NFS since 2003 I acted as one of the principal sound designers and/or sound supervisors and/or mixer for the cinematics. The cinematics are usually hard to do as they come in at the last moment, have to integrate well with the game, and have to flow smoothly in and out of the game. On average, each NFS has between 20-45 minutes of movies. Over the years several groups and post houses (Danetracks, Warner Brothers, Sourcesound, Soundelux etc.) have worked on these cinematics and each have given it their own flavor.

The approach we use with editing is not really any different from a feature film. We usually start off with a design concept to establish what the general feel should be. Often this has been preset by the game already, so the movies follow that path.

We then find a post house, or group of individuals who can take that concept and make it their own. The sequences get spotted, sound edited, designed etc. The team usually has a principal sound designer, several sound editors, a musical editor/designer, FX recoridst(s), foley artist and re-recording mixer(s). When editing is about to finish, the premixes start, and after some design tweaks, followed by the final mix. These sequences are usually some of the hardest to mix, as so much is happening. 2 years ago we started to work with Tom Ozanich who really understands this, and does a fantastic job mixing the majority of the ingame cinematics.

NFS Carbon

NFS Undercover Trailer

NFS Shift In-game Cinematics

NFS Shift Teaser

NFS Pro Street First Look

NFS Pro Street Teaser (one of my favorite)

DS: Another great feature on the Need for Speed series is the implementation. How is that process done? And what about the audio engine used on the game?

CD: On NFS we use the majority of EA’s tool-set; AEMS, Pathfinder, Renderware Audio etc. Beyond that the NFS team wrote their own mixing tool starting in 2004 which also has been used in numerous other titles (Skate, FiIFA, NBA street etc.). This tool can modulate over 2000+ parameters each frame without eating up much CPU and acts as an interactive dub-stage equivalent. It was developed by John Twigg and Cliff Kondratiuk. It is still in use today, but in the next few months will be replaced with a more refined version. Splicer is another tool written by the NFS crew. It basically can read Protools sessions and allows very quick multilayer sounds to be created.

Splicer

Aems is our MAX/MSP equivalent runtime. Originally developed during the SSX years by EA Tech. NFS audio programmers recently wrote a new interactive music tool, taking full advantage of beat-matching, overlays, multi-tracks, animation-matching etc. This will be used in a future NFS. We also have a proprietary way of playing back car audio. This was developed by Patrick Ratto. It’s been our work-horse since 2004 when the first review on NFS Underground 2 (official U.S playstation magazine) read “The sound effects are without any shadow of a doubt the most amazing I’ve ever heard in a videogame. The rasp of the engine is so unbelievably believable that you can actually feel the reverberation of the exhaust as the ower surges through it. It will change your expectations of what a game can sound like”. Now this engine is in it’s 3rd version, and we’re doing a re-invention on it. Most games are still working on refining car audio sound reproduction, we’ve moved into making the cars’ audio come alive, be real, be as expected. We’re using a whole new tool-set for this, and some magnificent audio artists.

NFS Mixing Tool

DS: And what you can tell us about the dialogue? There is a particular way to deal with this on NFS?

CD: The majority of our dialog has been Cop Dialog. During NFS Most Wanted we came up with a new way of recording dialog which was the breakthrough for that game. It added a whole new layer of realism which carried on through Carbon and Undercover. During GDC and other events, people still ask me how we’ve done this, and I smile :) Last year, Audio Artist Phil Hunter did a lecture during GDC about this and explained the simple, but very effective method behind it. That said, to us this method is now a bit of a has-been. We’re looking for the next solution; how to get great, instantly believable performances out of actors without making them sound gamey. So far we’ve had some good results, but also found a hundred ways on what not to do. As previously mentioned I think this is where gaming will get to their next incarnation; believability. That’s our main focus now. Gaming in general needs to move on, and leave the saturday morning cartoon performances behind.

DS: What would be the next step for Need for Speed? Would you like to have something special in the next-gen consoles to improve
the game?

CD: For next gen consoles we’re not going to say “no” to more ram, and more DSP. Our awesome NFS audio programmers always find a way to make use of every little bit of CPU or ram left over. That said, graphics in general on games have to catch up to audio to overcome the uncanny valley effect, so a better graphics processor is in dire need.

Need for Speed is continuing strong. We’ve listened to the consumers and EA has put in great effort to turn the franchise around. The next few releases should really show this. I’m very excited about it. It feels like the re-invention that happened during NFS Underground. Everybody was stoked about that game. That same feeling is coming back, in a big way.

As for sound, we’re doing the same; giving multiple spins to audio and car reproduction. Each game will feel very different. Even though we might share the sound recordings, each game has a totally different way of processing and implementing this. Hopefully consumers and sound peers will enjoy the next generation of NFS as much as we enjoy making it.

Need for Speed main website

Designing Sound: Hi Charles, first of all, would be great to have an introduction about your career. How did you start, how you grow up in the sound world, and so on…

Charles Deenen: Thanks for the invite! We’ll have a fun month together with (hopefully) lots of usable info.

I’ve been called an old fella by some young folks in the industry, so am getting up there in age. I grew up in the netherlands and around 1983, attempted to start doing audio on a computer. That was the era of Commodore PET, so I tried to get tolerable sound out of a single-beep CBM-PET, and oh my, that didn’t go so well, LOL. Soon after acquiring a C64, I started to make music/graphic demos, through which I met Jeroen Tel. We wanted to make our own music, and wrote a music-driver for the Commodore 64. Well, this led to us having the “odd” idea that maybe we could make money doing this. You know, maybe just enough to pay for some gum and floppy-disks. There we travelled as young teenagers, all dressed up, to the european computer show in London where Hewson gave us our first paid gig. Apparently they liked what we did, and this led to many more jobs from a wide range of companies. Initially, I mainly provided the sound-effects for the titles which we did, but soon had to delve into doing music. Well, I knew nothing about music. I knew that a C major sounded OK after a D minor, that’s about it, LOL. However, funny enough the first music pieced I did wasn’t bad, and started doing more and more.

Early appreciation of cars

In the late 80‘s our company “Maniacs of Noise” had to begin sub-contracting, and at its peak had 5 people making musical noise at once. Considering those early computer-game years, that was huge. During those time, computer games were not nearly as main-stream as now. Zzap 64 was about the only magazine dedicated to gaming, and a game development team was 3-4 people. We provided music and/or sfx for over a hundred games on Commodore 64, 128, Amiga, Atari ST and Spectrum.

In 1990, one of the projects we did was “Dragon’s War” by Interplay which I’d taken on. They liked what I did, and asked me to move to the USA. Only 20 years old, I said “sure, why not”. After all Visa related items were completed I moved to Irvine, CA in the middle of 1991 where I started as Audio Director for Virgin Games and Interplay Productions. After doing McKids for Virgin on the NES, I moved solely to Interplay where I stayed for the next 10 years. Startrek, Baldur’s Gate, Ice-Wind Dale, Descent and others were some of the franchises I worked on while employed there. After a short stint at Shiny where I worked on the Matrix game, I went freelance to work on feature films. Thanks for Soundstorm, who gave me a chance on “Superman”, “Fast and Furious” and “2 Fast 2 Furious” were some of the first ones I worked on. This is were I fell in love with cars and emotionally engaging sound design.

Electronic Arts was in the process to re-boot their Need for Speed franchise a bit with NFS Underground.  During this, I received a call from a very nice gentlemen at EA who asked if I’d be interested to move to canada to work on this. My first reaction was “canada… oh man… that’s too cold… thanks, but no”. Through the generosity of EA, my wife and I visited Vancouver, BC and actually really liked it, so we ended up moving there.   We had the fortunate luck to find a house which allowed me to build a nice studio from which I do a fair bit of (non game) projects as well.

Since 2001, doing sound for Feature film trailers has been a side-job on weekends. Daredevil was my first one, and since then have worked on more than 60 of them including some recent ones like “Clash of the Titans” and “Salt”.

They are my learning cases. How to do great sound-design under an extreme tight deadline has you reaching for the most odd solutions, which in turn help with the production of video-game sound design.

DS: You’re creating sounds since the era of the Commodore and Atari ST… What do you think about the evolution of the game audio industry? What could be the next step?

CD: We’ve now reached a level of sound reproduction similar to film sound. The next era will not be about “more voices” and “more dsp”, it’ll be about creating emotionally engaging and believable soundscapes. 95% of games still break the believability barrier within the first few minutes, wether it’s through actor performances, character placement or odd pauses and gaps. There are many ways to take a player out of the experience, and that’s still our biggest issue today. Added technology will help, and make it easier again, but until we overcome this believability gap, all the technology in the world is not going to do it for us.

DS: You have worked as freelance and in-house… What would better for you? What you learn of each “status” and what do you recommend for all the sound designers out there?

CD: I was always freaking out a bit when I was freelance. Always looking for the next gig. It drove me insane at times. The insecurity of having a mortgage and family to sustain and the need for a constant stream of income worried me greatly. Oddly enough I never had to really look for jobs when I was doing freelance work, it was merely the “what if” factor that did it.

What I’d recommend freelance sound designers to do is become good and fast. Easier said than done I know, and it might be a simple statement. There are so many sound designers out there who haven’t been exposed to musical pacing, musical editing styles, or haven’t been exposed enough to highly demanding directors who crave for a emotionally stimulating and fitting soundbed. These experiences are needed to sustain in a demanding, volatile market-place to be able to rely on your experiences to deliver. Also, specializing in something really helps getting some sound design jobs. For example right now I’m hired a fair bit for car chases and any other vehicles. That seems to have become my “thing”.

The amount of games with large budgets is rapidly decreasing. The request for “cheaper and faster” not only is hitting the film industry, but also the game industry. In this situation though, cheaper and faster doesn’t mean “worse”. Industry peers are still expecting high quality work. The trick is how to gain the experience of doing something fast and good. This is only something you can learn mostly on your own, learning your own strengths and boundaries. Its critical you acquire honest feedback. If everybody keeps on telling you your work is awesome, there’s something amiss, unless your name is Randy maybe. You simply haven’t met the producer or director yet who has found some flaws in your work which requires improvement or adaptation. Now, make sure you continue to work for that person. He’s the one who’ll drive you further (or nuts in some cases :)

DS: I can see a couple of series of video games and films, such as NFS series, Star Trek and Fast and the Furious. What are the sound challenges on each sequel? The game/film is always different, but the essence is the same, so how you make to have a sequel of sound too?

CD: Sequels have indeed their dilemma’s. You’re asked to better the work you did which was last year was just considered “your best”. Now “your best”=old, and you’re faced with re-inventing the sound-design you did. In some cases you’re lucky and the movie or game has a new feel which will inspire this. For each project I always look for the single “it-factor”. Sometimes this doesn’t come to fruition until the last second, and sometimes it ignites the project. For example on NFS Shift we did these “in your head” driver experience sound-beds. This resulted out of an early teaser where I played around with non typical sounds, trying to emulate what a driver would hear in a race. This came partially due to the “driver experience” slogan the game just got. This stimulated the signatory sound for the NFS Shift FMV’s and menu-beds.

Charles at Interplay

DS: What kind of software you use to work with sound at EA Black Box? What are the technology to work with the implementation process?

CD: Some industry folks say that we’re spoiled at EA. I hear this often at GDC and such. Know though that the technology we use is build by a very small team, and often on the game-teams themselves. Technology is not the end all be all.  For me, it’s less important how the tools work, as long as the result can be obtained. For the past years we’ve worked with a MAX/MSP style tool where we can manipulate sounds in almost any way in real-time. This has been the work-horse for many EA games for over 8 years.

Then there are game specific tools. For Blackbox’s Skate, we build tools which were able to emulate the skate-boarding sound much more realistic than ever before. For our driving games, we build a car-engine technology which (until recent) hadn’t been done in any other game. Now, with Dice’s Frostbite technology it makes it even easier for Artists at EA to integrate flawlessly with the game itself. So, yes in one way, we’re spoiled, but these tools are driven by folks who know what they want to hear, and through team-work, get great results.

I recall when I started at EA in 2003 we were mixing in text-files, and had to restart the game everytime we made a single change. Now, it’s all real-time, thanks to a talented group of programmers and the artists who steered them  In hearing the many storeis from other companies, I do believe EA has some of the most advanced tools right now, and we’re making them even better every day.

DS: What you consider as the most important skill of any sound designer must have?

CD: Will-power. Never give up. Sometimes directors will ask the impossible of a sound-designer, and I’ve seen many give up. The ones that didn’t,  became the leaders in this industry. One story I’ve told many is one that happened to me during Descent; I wanted to make a very cool ship fly-by, and whatever I did sucked. Determined not to give up, I locked myself up in my sound-design room, not to leave it until I arrived at a result. I started off by mimicking some other ship fly-by’s from movies in order to learn. This was the hardest part; I had to create each element from scratch with a very limited library. Frustration set in rapidly, but got to know my effects processors (DSP4000, PCM80, DSP4, BBE, SPL’s etc. etc. at that time) very very well. After 3 days and nights I ended up with a set which I really liked, but that wasn’t the payoff. The real payoff was that I had just learned 100+ ways on how to make by’s, air-distortion, clean tonal whooshes etc. Those 3 days have brought me partially where I’m at today.

Another big part is real-world inspiration. Sound Designers who don’t get to hear the world and its wonderful plethora of sounds, and/or don’t expose themselves to other people inspirational work, will inhibit themselves of growing to their full potential.

Sound Designers also must find a mentor to learn from, people who inspire them to greatness. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. You’ll be amazed how many people are very willing to help others, especially in the sound community.

Few more things I value in sound-designers; musical understanding, musical sensability, and rhythmic sense, as well as the ability to know every owned plug-in’s potential very well.

DS: You’ve worked in film and video games. If you had to choose just one, what would it be? and why?

CD: That’s like making me choose between Candy and Chips. Come on !! :) Each have their best parts; Game development has a real sense of team-work. You become part of the development from day 1, and get to adapt the game to make it work better with audio to enable a richer player’s experience. You get to play with a lot of technical tools, which is really fun, but the amount of emotional fulfillment isn’t nearly as high as film. With film or other cinematic experiences you’re usually working to make a director or sound supervisor happy. You work purely on sound and its emotions, with no worries on how to play it back. The amount of emotional connection to picture is a dozen times higher. I edit sound on picture based on feel, not on # of channels available or trigger mechanism. It’s a whole different paradigm, but I wouldn’t want to miss either one. Sound design for film speaks to my emotional side. Sound design for games covers a lot of my technical outlets.

DS: How you survive to “the crunch”?

CD: When you get older, surviving a crunch becomes harder and harder, and I can’t honestly say I survive it well anymore. I simply can’t do the 80-100 hour weeks I used to do. At this point its more important to me to get stuff done earlier vs. later. This makes the crunch at the end is a lot shorter. My job over the last 3 years  (through my own doing) has been close to a constant “crunch”, helping out several games during their final stages. It also had me travel quite a lot which, combined with late hours, can get a bit straining. But that said I’m not complaining about it. Will-power makes me overcome the crunch, and the end-result always is the pay-off. Lets say I like coffee and “beaver buzz” energy drinks :) But my real goal is to limit crunches by setting deadlines much sooner, and by distributing more of the work. The crew at EA is awesome. They all help out during needy times.

However I’ve had my downs too; during my first year at EA I was doing some late nights since I wanted to learn every tool quickly, and was drinking a lot of Mountain Dew. Now, nobody in canada had told me that you can artificially put caffeine in a drink, so the mountain dew I was drinking didn’t have the usual buzz I was used to. After 7 cans I was wondering why the hell I was falling asleep.. The next morning, there was quite a bit of chuckling going on when they explained the canadian non-caffeine rule… damn :)

DS: How many time you spend playing games?

CD: Honestly, fairly little since I have little spare time. I check out the competition of games we work on, and any games my friends work on, and/or highly praised sound-jobs on games. Usually I spend enough time with them to get the jist, but hardly find myself continuing to play for “fun”. Luckily through some peer judging panels I’m part of, every year I get to play 20+ games during december and march, and usually those are the best of the best that year, so it’s fun to check them out and talk among peers about what’s great etc.

DS: Someone you admire? Any special influence in the world of sound?

CD: There’s many folks I admire, either for their talent, their perseverance, their contributions to the industry or other. Whenever people ask me this question, the first person that comes to mind is Harry Cohen. For the last 15 years he’s been my inspiration for sound-design, and he’s always open to share some advice and/or techniques.
The other that comes to mind I John Fasal. Everytime we work together he remains calm, even under the greatest stress, and always delivers quality work. There aren’t many people who can do this on a consistent basis. I want to learn his “zen mode”, LOL.

Having known Tommy T for 19 years, ever since we worked together at Virgin, I admire everything he’s done to promote the game industry towards the outside world. We’ve had our differences for sure, but that doesn’t take away from everything he’s accomplished in those 19 years.

I also admire people who speak their mind, and don’t bullshit. Some execs in my past talked a good talk, but don’t always walk the walk. This in turn made them loose respect from the crew. A great visionary (exec) producer who knows what he wants is his weight worth in gold.

DS: Finally, could you tell us something about your current projects? And for the future?

CD: In January, I went back to work mainly on Need for Speed games, to help shape its bright future. At home I’m still helping out on an occasional ad, trailer or movie, but have tried to take more time off to enjoy life with my lovely wife. My hobby of photography (http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdeenen/sets/) is also moving a bit to the foreground. A few years back I noticed that a lot of fellow sound designers are also photographers, and have enjoyed sharing techniques with them on both sound and photography.   One of my biggest pleasures will remain helping folks excel at what they do, and succeed.

Seeing the plethora of young, very talented sound designers arise through the masses makes me realize our industry has a bright, but very different future.  Each person brings their own element to the table.  Too bad we don’t have a sound design museum. We should. There is so much great work out there done by all these folks to be enjoyed and inspire a whole new generation.

The future will also hold more relaxing time, I hope :)

Thanks for listening

February will be a great month for Designing Sound. We’ll have a lot of great stuff, starting with this month’s featured sound designer: Charles Deenen.

Bio

In a career that has spanned more than twenty years, Charles has leant his hand to over 200 games, numerous films, and dozens of film trailers.

In the 80’s, Charles and a partner founded the world’s first company dedicated to producing audio for computers. Charles’ work was eventually noticed by Interplay Entertainment, he moved from the Netherlands to work on Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, and Star Trek game franchises, among others.

In 2000, Charles took a break from the gaming industry to pursue sound design for films. During that time, he worked on two Fast and Furious films , among others. This work translated into a passion for fast cars, loud sound, and the ultimate pursuit of emotionally-engaging audio. Alongside long-format sound design, Charles continues to contribute to Hollywood’s trailer advertising arm.

Charles returned to game audio on the Matrix franchise for Shiny Entertainment in 2002. This led to a full time position in the role of Senior Audio Director at Electronic Arts Vancouver. Here, he managed to combine his fascination for fast cars with his history in games on the Need for Speed series.

Currently living in Port Moody, BC with his lovely wife Ana, he enjoys spending his spare-time withpPhotography, music remixing and watching movies.

Some Works

• Need for Speed – Franchise (2003 and up) – Sr. Audio Director (Blackbox) & Sound Designer
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) – Sound effects editor
• The Incredible Hulk (2008) – Sound effects editor
• Skate – Franchise – Sr. Audio Director (Blackbox) & Add’nl Re-recording mixer/designer
• NBA Street Homecourt (2007) – Sound designer and Sound re-recording mixer
• Enter the Matrix (Video Game) (2003) – Audio Director & Sound Designer
• Baldur’s Gate – Franchise (1993-2001) Audio Director
• Star Trek – Franchise @ Interplay (1993-2001) – Audio Director & Re-Recording Mixer
• The Fast and the Furious – Sound designer
• 2 Fast 2 Furious – Sound designer
• Fallout – Franchise – (1994-2001) – Audio Director
• Icewind Dale – Audio Director
• Descent – Franchise – (1995-2000) Sound designer and Sound re-recording mixer
• Trailers: Clash of the Titans, Salt, Fast & Furious, Hancock, Dark Knight, 10000BC & many more

Full Credits
Charles Deenen on IMDb
Charles Deenen on Twitter
Charles Deenen Website
Photography hobbypage

Nice video about the sound of “Army of Two: The 40th Day” of EA Games Montreal. You can see composer Tyler Bates talking about the music and Lewis James talking about the sound design and the weapons sounds.

Army of Two: The 40th Day Website