[Rob Bridgett, audio director on Prototype 2 issues a rallying cry for the mixing of the audio discipline with the rest of the studio, and opening up the closed studio space to collaboration -- perhaps even suggesting a fundamental change in studio structure.]

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In this feature, experienced audio director Rob Bridgett (Prototype) explains how the expanded possibilities brought by modern technology have lead sound directors to have to make careful collaborative choices to support a game’s vision.

Sound Friction: Collaborative Challenges in Games

Since the launch of the iPhone, apps have been big, especially in the games sector, which has seen some sell like AAA titles. Major developers have added the iPhone to their list of available platforms for existing titles, as well as moved to develop unique titles just for it.

It has been a great platform for the indie developer too, thanks to its great accessibility, seeing games from very small groups of people reach huge audiences.

New opportunities have been opened up for people left in the wake of the recession to start their own developer ventures, setting up new companies and designing games, knowing there will be an audience for them.

It is the mobile nature, unique interface, huge number of users, great accessibility to developers and the nature of the “app” (short, simple, high quality games with a focus on playability) that has been incredibly useful to many developers.

With games being so large, though, and the bar for quality being set so high, what challenges does fitting such a big game in a tiny device involve? More specifically, what does this entail for the “audio guy”?

Continue reading…

Via G.A.N.G Newsletter

Rob Bridgett has published a very interesting article on Gamasutra called “Getting Game Audio Right: The Big Picture”. Let’s read!

This feature takes a brief look at how to tie audio production dates into the overall delivery schedule of a large-scale video game — including the key dependencies you should be fully aware of.

During production, it is often the case for each component of game audio to be either dependent on some other area of work to be completed, or some other area of the game is dependent on audio finishing a particular piece of work. Understanding how all these pieces are inter dependant is the key to not only locking-in and delivering on-time, but also to staying agile and having a production schedule that is simple to read and aides communication across groups.

The working practice behind scheduling for video game production is an increasingly complicated one and boils down to an approach that embraces locking-in tightly and firmly committing, yet being ready and prepared for changes at any time.

At the same time, you must also fully understand that any changes will have implications elsewhere in the production.

Continue Reading…

Via: aandersen

[Veteran audio designer Rob Bridgett (Scarface, Prototype) here outlines how audio designers can avoid creative fatigue and deliver the most compelling audio while collaborating on large studio projects.]

There are a great many reasons why gathering critical input from trusted colleagues and other sources is of a huge benefit to improving the sound on a video game production. Feedback comes in many different ways and at many different times, but not always of our choosing and not always articulated in a way that is easy to understand.
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In this feature I’ll explore some of the ways that feedback can present itself, when it is useful, and some methods by which this essential process can be leveraged in order to acquire some truly valuable criticism during development.

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Some days ago I read this great article on Gamasutra created by my friend Damian Kastbauer, and I just realized that I didn’t talk about it on the blog, so if you haven’t read it yet, you can do it now:

It’s a great time in game audio these days. As we move forward in the current console generation, several emerging examples of best practices in audio implementation have been exposed through articles, demonstrations, and video examples.

Even though in some ways it feels like the race towards next gen has just begun, some of the forward-thinking frontrunners in the burgeoning field of Technical Sound Design have been establishing innovative techniques and pulling off inspirational audio since the starting gun was fired over four years ago with the release of the Xbox 360.

It’s a good feeling to know that there are people out there doing the deep thinking in order to bring you some of the richest audio experiences in games available today. In some ways, everyone working in game audio is trying to solve a lot of the same problems.

Whether you’re implementing a dynamic mixing system, interactive music, or a living, breathing ambient system, the chances are good that your colleagues are slaving away trying to solve similar problems to support their own titles.

In trying to unravel the mystery of what makes things tick, I’ll be taking a deeper look at our current generation of game sound and singling out several pioneers and outspoken individuals who are leaving a trail of interactive sonic goodness (and publicly available information) in their wake. Stick around for the harrowing saga of the technical sound designer in today’s multi-platform maelstrom.

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Let’s read one of the best articles of Rob Bridgett, called: Hoollywood Sound.

Rob Bridgett:

These three features for Gamasutra were written at a point on the production of the Scarface game where my thinking about how the worlds of game audio and movie sound could intersect began. At that time the industry had already seen movie sound personnel working very well on music in games, similarly in terms of voice over actors. Surround sound technologies and standards were also being represented in home theatre and video game soundtracks were leveraging this technology that had been put into people’s homes through advent of DVD, and now Bluray and HD audio.

This piece is in extended exploration of how the worlds of game sound and film sound are intersecting in terms of production. These three articles each deal with one of the main areas of game audio and go into some detail, along with interviews, about the working practices of movie and game sound practitioners. Looking back, I think the piece describes an art form and production practice that has already found ways to appropriate and cross pollinate content from other media.

There are three parts, too extensive to publish it just one post, so you can read the article online, or download it as a .PDF file.

Part 1 — [Online] [Download]

Part 2 — [Online] [Download]

Part 3 — [Online] [Download]

Scarface: The world is yours was one of the most important achievements in the carrer of Rob Bridgett. We already seen some information about this title, on the special of Randy Thom, who also participated in the making of the sound od Scarface (VG). In the video of the top, you can see Rob Bridgett doing a “live game mixing” demo of Scarface Sound at GDC 2007. (Note that there is some questionable language in the video)

Introduction (By Rob Bridgett for Designing Sound)

Looking back at the Scarface game’s audio production I am still astonished by its scope and ambition. For me it reflects some of the visual and auditory excess present in the Scarface movie. Looking back from the perspective of our recent economic recession it seems like a very decadent production, but it couldn’t really have been done any other way, it was true to the spirit of the movie. The audio budget itself was significantly larger than most, but this enabled us to make some very big moves in bridging the gap between movie audio production and game audio production. The question for me with regards to film sound and game sound, and it was a challenge on this project, was always (and still is) “Where can these two branches of audio production intersect usefully?”

The biggest win for the game was in getting the audio team at Skywalker involved and invested in our project, working with us on ‘movie style’ post-production sound for a game. We effectively defined what ‘movie style post-production on a game’ was. This allowed us to carefully plan in advance four whole weeks of off-site audio production, completely undistracted by our regular meetings, concentrating on only the sound of the game and how we could improve it. This all happened at the end of post-production when the changes we made made had the most impact overall.

In our preparation we spent time leveraging our in-house technology to best fit the working styles of movie sound professionals in the form of a tactile mixing desk interface for controlling in-game parameters. Best of all, having the input of a fresh and enthusiastic post-production audio team injected a totally renewed passion for the quality of the game audio into the entire sound team, who had up until that point been working on that single project for three years.

WHAT WENT RIGHT (some excerpts from Gamasutra)

Dialogue

Designing a flexible and reactive dialogue system that immersed the player was a huge challenge, and one of the core game features we had to get right. The dialogue had to be a cohesive part of the Scarface universe, so inevitably there needed to be a certain amount of fowl language and a great deal of humor.

Designer involvement with the dialogue system was needed from day one of the project and we got this support and involvement in the form of the project’s design lead, Pete Low. Design was therefore involved in script and character development for each and every character, particularly in establishing the emotional range of dialogue that would be required from Tony himself.

Each character that was designed had around 10 categories of reaction, and for each of those categories they had around 10 variants of line that could be played each time one of those events occurred. This meant that each character had around 100+ lines, not to mention all the cinematic lines and mission specific dialogue that were required. A great deal of the additional dialogue for the in-game characters was written by writers local to us in Vancouver, they essentially churned out a huge quantity of situational one-liners for hundreds of characters resulting in over 33,000.

Post Production: Sound Design and Mix at Skywalker Sound

We wanted to work with a post production sound team using a similar model to the way that movie sound is ‘post-produced’ at the end of a project. Typically in games the last month of a project is a real scramble to fix problems and to make sure everything is actually being heard; however, we wanted to bring the whole audio development environment off-site during this time so we could concentrate on quality without any of the panic and distractions that come with that crunch period at the end of the project.

Having visited several ‘Hollywood’ post production studios, the decision to work with Skywalker was pretty clear for what we needed. We knew they had done work on games before, but that isn’t what attracted us to them. They had the staff and experience we needed to really push the game in the direction of a movie. There were two things we needed to concentrate on in our post-production; the sound design and the final mix.

Post-Production Sound Design

We had an initial week of preparation work with Randy Thom in March where we sat down, reviewed the movie and went through the Scarface game running on disc, noting all the areas we felt we could improve the sounds we had in there. We came away with a lot of ambience, weapon sounds and a stack of vehicle sounds that we then spent two months implementing into the game back in Vancouver.

The second week we spent with Randy was for the real-time sound effects replacement in June, where Randy got to create sounds, have them built into the game, and then decided on what needed changing about those sounds in order for them to work how we wanted them to. We managed to iterate relatively quickly in terms of video games and both felt that this was the only way we could have worked, given that in the past, video games developers often get sound designers to create sounds without seeing the game, and certainly without being able to hear how those sounds work in context after implementation and down-sampling has occurred.

The sound effects in the game quickly began to take on the direction of the personality of Tony Montana, him being a larger than life character. A great example is Tony’s M16 in the opening mansion shootout. We worked hard on getting the enemy weapons sounding good, so good in fact that we eventually realized that Tony’s M16 now sounded less aggressive by comparison. We worked on Tony’s M16 sound for a whole day; we even gave it the largest sample rate of any sound in the game so it will cut through in that particular scene.

The Mix

In terms of the final mix, this was something we felt had never been attempted successfully in the past in video games, both from a technology point of view and from the point of view of having the whole game be mixed by someone who specializes in film mixing.

Juan Peralta, our mixer, fit the bill perfectly as he is passionate about games and has mixed a ton of movies. Also doing the mix on a sound stage with a near-field monitor set-up that has been calibrated by THX was the perfect place to mix for a home theatre system. It would have made little sense for us to use some of the bigger rooms available at Skywalker, as they are specially designed for theatrical releases.

The sound stage we were on, The Elia Kazan, is used for theatrical mixing, but the near field Genelec set up we employed is how they do DVD mixing. This made it perfect for our needs on a video game. We were pretty clear that most people now have 5.1 theatre systems in their homes, primarily for watching movies, but those with consoles are of course plugging them into these systems and expecting the same quality of sound as they get from their movie experience.

The major difference with the mix on Scarface was that we were connecting the audio levels of all the sounds in the game to a software mixing console, and then connecting that to a hardware mixing console (the Mackie Control Universal and Extender). We route every sound to various busses; for example, all non-player character dialogue goes to the ‘dialogue bus’, all Tony’s dialogue goes to the ‘Tony bus’, all bullet impacts and squibs go to the ‘squib bus’, score goes to the ‘music bus’, tape player music to the ‘tape bus’, and so on. In all we had around 20 busses. All these were mapped out in our proprietary interactive audio system called “Audio builder” developed by our Advanced Technology Group at Radical in Vancouver.

This then connects via the PC it is running on, to both the game and via MIDI to a Mackie Control and a Mackie Extender console, so all these busses appeared on the mixing board as channels. We wouldn’t have been able to mix the game in such a way without that external MIDI controller functionality – all mixing prior to this was done on-screen with a mouse clumsily moving the fader levels. It was so difficult to move the faders in that way, it felt very counter intuitive, and certainly wouldn’t have made any sense to expect a professional film mixer to use on-screen mouse driven faders. [..]

Working with THX

THX’s involvement in the project, particularly during post-production, proved to be highly valuable. The THX Games certification not only encompasses audio but also the visual environment in which the artists work. THX certification is designed to ensure game developers always work in highly standardized environments with calibrated equipment, whether that’s a PC workstation (for texture artists, etc.) or a large mixing studio, like the ones at Skywalker Sound.

The THX engineers visited Radical as we were entering our Pre Alpha stage of production and took measurements that enabled us to calibrate all the art lead’s monitors, and led to the establishment of a THX room on the game team’s floor in which any artist could drop by and check their work on calibrated equipment.

The THX Professional Applications Engineer, Andrew Poulain was on site when we set up the mix stage at Skywalker in order to ensure the room and equipment was calibrated correctly, which again proved invaluable for our mix to take place as we were making a lot of critical artistic decisions about the audio in this environment, and we had to know that what we heard was entirely accurate.

WHAT WENT WRONG

Design Changes During Production

Though unavoidable and clearly for the greater good of the game, the change of direction for the project midway through development brought about by a six month extension to our Alpha date, and presented challenges for the dialogue system and for the flexibility of the content we had already recorded.

These changes meant that many scenes that had been written for the story were cut completely, and although some scenes were re-appropriated they did not make as much coherent sense as the full scenes they used to be. Many characters were also cut from the game, as well as many side missions for which very specific characters had been created, cast and recorded. Those characters now were only to appear in the game world as pedestrians, which made them seem a little odd without their context.

With all the ripples that the extension gave us, these changes led eventually to a much more streamlined and solid product. The extension in the amount of time we had also allowed us to plan and execute the post-production mixing, and thus gave us a huge gain in terms of final audio quality.

Cinematics Production Cut Off Too Late

Production of the huge amounts of cinematics that we have in the game was eventually cut off around two weeks before we went off-site to Skywalker to mix the game’s audio. This gave us a mere two weeks to work on Foley performance, recording and editing for those scenes.

Due to the huge amount of cinematic cut-scenes in the game, we had to prioritize the more important ones to receive the attention of full Foley, as there simply was not enough time to perform Foley for all the cut scenes we had. Our internal Foley team, Scott Morgan, Cory Hawthorne and Roman Tomazin, worked for a solid week in performing the Foley, and then a further week editing and bouncing down the Foley mixes for integration into the sessions which contained SFX and dialogue.

This practically left no time to do mix-downs of the final sessions including dialogue and sound effects, so the team were put under a great deal of pressure to bounce out and mix all the cinematics for the game in both Pro Logic II encoded versions and in Dolby 5.1 six channel mixes. These were all bounced out over the course of two or three long evenings and the intention was not to touch these mixes once we got to Skywalker.

However, once arriving on the stage we found we needed to add more sounds and balance the sounds in some of the cinematics, so as we came to them we re-bounced them on the mix stage. A dedicated month for Foley and premixing the cinematics is a must for future productions of this scale.

Dialogue

Recording the amount of dialogue we did, in excess of 33,000 lines, was a huge undertaking. Recording wasn’t completed until March 2006, totaling almost a year and a half of VO casting, recording, editing and implementation.

One of the things that contributed significantly to this amount of time was the extension to the project half way through the first phase of our recording, and therefore new designs and ripples in the narrative meant new characters and new scenes, and a good amount of callback sessions were required half way through production.

Improvements to the dialogue system soon became evident when we realized the huge amount of content we had to manage. A simple, dedicated database system would need to be developed to enter, sort, organize, print, edit and debug all the dialogue. We used Microsoft Excel to manage the entire dialogue on this project, which although workable, proved very hard to manage and debug, making dialogue management a full-time job.

It also proved inflexible later on in development when we needed to re-appropriate lines of dialogue to be used in new situations, as our naming convention dictated the use of dialogue in the game to a great extent, and meant we had to duplicate and rename content in order to get it used in new places in the game. The development of a flexible system, which treats functionality independent of filename and which packages the files needed per character only at the build process, would help tremendously on similar scale projects.

Continue Reading (with conclusion, databox and more) at Gamasutra…
Videos via audiophilemonkey

Gamasutra has published another amazing featured article for audio, with Rob Bridgett, who examines the key issues and possible solutions to common problems in game dialogue production.

Dialogue production for a large budget, cinematic video game can often be an intense and often brutally challenging process. Getting an actor in the booth and reading a script is in itself a monumental achievement that requires solid tools, pipelines, and communication.
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While there are a great many articles written about the voice actor’s process and performance, there is a dearth of information about the technical process and steps that are taken prior to and after the recording session, and it is these processes, planning, and techniques “behind the scenes” on which this feature will concentrate.

There is a wide spectrum of different approaches to dialogue tools and production process throughout the industry. It is fair to say in fact that almost every developer has a totally different way of working, and there is certainly no rulebook — as long as the job gets done to the desired quality.

However, working on an integrated dialogue database solution from beginning to end of production can speed up process, reduce organisation and administration time both in and out of recording sessions, and remove a whole slew of duplicated work and a mess of multiple scripts from various members of the dialogue production team.

The desire and benefits are clearly there for a tightening up of the production process and integration of dialogue through a single master database. Sadly dialogue is one of the areas that audio directors and audio designers can be less passionate about, and the lack of investment in solid tools, process and pipelines is probably due in some part to this.

Dialogue, it can be argued, is perhaps the single most important aspect of video game audio, in that it is often the only element of the audio that a reviewer will mention, and poorly implemented and badly directed dialogue can completely ruin an entire game.

Dialogue production also has very deep dependencies stemming from within mission design, story architecture, and it’s anchored at the heart of cinematic production dependencies. To this end it needs to be one of the tightest and most organized and “locked-down” elements of audio production, yet remain completely fluid and open to change all the way along the chain.

Conitinue reading…

Duane Decker

Audio has always been a huge part of the storytelling and fun factor for games. No matter what platform or how much technology is poured into a game, there will always be a need for composers, musicians, sound designers, voice actors and audio engineers to help create the content that immerses players in a unique and entertaining world.

Some audio directors and sound designers work in-house for developers and publishers. Others provide their services on a project-by-project basis for a variety of clients on a contract basis. By contracting audio professionals (the way the film and television industries have done for decades), developers and publishers can get high quality work without the expense of hiring full time employees and equipping full-blown recording studios. There are advantages and disadvantages to both ways of acquiring audio for a game. But in this feature we are going to focus on the bond that ties the professional audio contractor to a project — the Audio Contract.

Full Article here.