Here is the final interview with Rob Bridgett, about Prototype, talking about the sound of the cinematics, the mixing process, and more!

Designing Sound: First of all tell us something about what was your contribution on Prototype and what do you did for the sound of the game?

Rob Bridgett: In late 2007, the audio director for the project, Scott Morgan, asked if I could get involved and help out with the game mid-production. Cory Hawthorne was working as Technical Sound Designer and Implementer on the project which meant I had the opportunity to cover two areas on the game, one was as cinematics sound designer and implementer and the other was as game mixer. In terms of the first role, I was responsible for the sound effects, Foley, dialogue editing and mix of all the cut scenes in the game. The music was edited and supervised by the sound director for the project, Scott Morgan, and once all the components were assembled I would provide a mix automation pass before the finished file went into the game.

The second role, that of mixer, was one that came into play only during the post-production sound beta phase of the project’s development, in which Scott and I spend four weeks mixing the entire game in Radical’s 7.1 mix room. I always welcome the opportunity to help out on projects like this as it offers a break from being an audio director and allows a lot more time to concentrate more fully on one or two areas in particular.

DS : Can you tell us something about the process for the cinematics sound production?

RB: Sure. I’ll talk you through a typical set-up and process that I use on cinematics. The actual work on the cut-scenes starts fairly early in production. Once a script has been approved for production, placeholder dialogue is recorded here, for this we typically just use members of the team to read out the dialogue. We record this, edit it and give those files to the animation team so that they can begin their storyboarding process. They use these placeholder files to come up with very rough timings and shot lists which really gets the whole process kick started. Usually during this time, the actors are cast for the cinematics and they are recorded which eventually means that after a couple of months you have the real dialogue takes to work with and the animation team can start being more accurate with their timings.

Up until that stage, Scott Morgan, the game’s audio director had pretty much run the process, I was myself at this time finishing up the 50 cent game. I rolled onto the project in January 2008, at this point Scott had all the dialogue recorded and the cinematics team had some very rough avi files of the various cinematic scenes, so this was a good time to actually start building up the sound elements and structural foundations of the cinematics.

The first thing that I do is create a seperate Nuendo session for each scene. I typically do this from a cinematics template that I have created in Nuendo, which basically is an empty project with pre-assigned tracks and folder tracks.

• Dialogue Folder Track containing six mono tracks all assigned to CENTRE only
• SFX Folder Track containing five mono tracks all assigned to CENTRE only plus five stereo LR tracks
• Foley Folder track containing ten mono tracks all assigned to CENTRE only
• Ambience Folder Track containing four stereo tracks all panned LR and slightly LS RS
• Music Folder Track containing four LR stereo tracks and two 5.1 music tracks
• LFE folder track containing 4 mono tracks all assigned to LFE only.

These templates provide very quick structure to the whole project which is easy to navigate and expand upon. I recommend this for anyone getting into a new cinematics audio project as getting organized at the earliest stages like this saves tons of time later on.

As we had the dialogue ready and recorded, one of the first tasks for me to do was to go through all the scenes and ‘worldize’ the voices – rather than re-recording, I used Altiverb VST for each different room or physical space depicted in the scenes. The roomverb was panned mainly to the fronts (LCR) but also to the rears in order to give the sense of the listener being inside the room and surrounded by the reflections off the walls. This is quite a subtle effect, yet it adds a great deal of realism to dialogue that is recorded close-mic in an ADR room. Further to this some low-end was also rolled off the dialogue in order to simulate more of a distant mic / location sound feel. Having done this treatment on each of the cinematic scenes, it was time to move onto the second phase of building up the sound, adding roomtone and BG ambience.

For each scene and for each cut, I added roomtone that I had recorded here in the various spaces at Radical. There is a lot of AC in Radical and it makes for some useful roomtone source recordings, this meant that I had a ready to use library of roomtone beds which I could quickly edit into the scenes. For each camera cut in perspective the volumes of the roomtones were changed to ensure they corresponded to the listener position and point of view of the characters.

Scott Morgan had also been on location to New York to gather exterior ambience for the game, and it is these recordings that I was able to quickly use and edit together for any of the exterior scenes in the game. In fact, in the end I mainly relied on the actual background ambience file from the game for these ambience beds, as this would mean there was continuity between cut-scenes and game. In some of the scenes we also let the ambience present in the game continue throughout the cut-scene in order to maintain complete continuity from game to cut-scene and back to game again, for these instances, it just meant muting the ambience folder track on export.

With all the reverb and backgrounds built up, some effort could be put into sound effects design. An initial pass was done just concentrating on big fx moments like explosions or body impacts, also because the movies were low in detail at this point it could not be seen what materials or detail would be present in the final movies. All of the cut-scenes in the game used the in-game engine, so the full detail could only be seen at run-time in the game.

For the Foley in the cinematics we contracted Sharpe Sound here in Vancouver to cover the movements for all our cinematics scenes. The Foley was returned to us un-edited so the next phase of my work was to edit all the Foley and premix this so it sat well with the other effects and backgrounds. During all this work, the movies were constantly being iterated upon, receiving a lot of editing work and often large sequences would be re-cut and even deleted entirely. This meant lots of rounds of re-syncing dialogue and effects to the latest cuts of the movies.

By the time we reached Alpha and the work on the cut-scenes was locked down, I had two weeks in which to complete the final effects pass and mix on all the movies, matching the vo, music and effects levels for all of the movies. There were around 30 movies in total, around 45 minutes of in game rendered cut-scenes. Scott and I then reviewed all the cut scenes with the rest of the cinematics team and made notes of a few final tweaks before sign off.

DS: Did you record all the sound effects of the cinematics… what are the sources?

RB: We do have our own sound library here at Radical, in which we have archived many of our sources for other games such as Crash and Scarface. This library is invaluable in quickly getting sounds that I know will work. I think the key to good, fast work is actually knowing your library really well and being able to access exactly what you want quickly. The Foley, as I said, was all recorded fresh for this project, but the majority of the effects, the bodyfalls, punches and transformation sounds were all recorded here specifically for the project.

Perhaps the best example of some of the cinematic sound design we’ve been talking about is the ‘intro cinematic’ for the game which can be viewed online here…

DS: How about the mix for the game? Can you tell us something about the process involved for that?

RB: We have a proprietary run-time mixing system that enables us to do this attached to Mackie hardware control surfaces, the same one used on Scarface that I have talked about in depth elsewhere. For the mix we spent a total of four weeks, this time was broken down into a few different phases.

The first week of the mix was probably the most critical because it was where we set the overall output levels of the game. The first thing we did was to bring the whole output of all the channels down by around -6dB. This is because that when we started listening and mixing at reference listening level of 79dB, the game was incredibly loud. What tends to happen during development is that sounds are turned up and up so that you can hear them while you are populating the game with them, this approach is fine while in development, but at some point you have to reset the whole board and start from scratch again. This is what we did in the first few days of the mix. Getting the dialogue to a decent level and then ‘mixing around’ it is the approach we have been taking. So, once we’ve set our dialogue level, the music will be determined in relation to that, as with the effects and so on. Intelligibility of dialogue is really at the centre of most mixes to be honest, I still hear so many games today where you actually cannot audibly hear what is being said by certain characters because guns are being fired etc. This is perhaps one of the many areas where the styles of mixing in cinema is an influence.

Anyway, once the overall listening level is set, it is a matter of playing through the entire game, identifying key mix moments, mainly dialogue or mission related, but often tied to some in-game feature or effect like the thermal vision in prototype, for which we pitch down the ambience and add a low pass filter to many of the sounds in the game. Similarly for Infected Vision, where all sounds are given a muted treatment except for infected who remain clear and unprocessed during this mode. We also tweak every individual sound to make sure it is not too quiet or too loud. This is what takes the majority of time on a game mix, up to two weeks in this case, and all the time being aware of keeping the overall listening level tolerable for the player at home. Another major thing is to maintain the levels of sound, particularly dialogue and music, throughout cinematics and gameplay so that there isn’t a jarring disconnect between the two modes of exposition.

The final week of mixing we used to test how the game sounded on various mixdown configurations, such as stereo TV and all the various output configurations on the various consoles. The mix is tweaked at this point to ensure that users who listen on a tv set only are able to hear what they should be hearing, usually in the form of a few minor tweaks to music levels and dialogue levels but nothing too significant that it will adversely affect the surround mix.

DS: It’s a video game for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360… to work with sound… what platform you prefer?

RB: A tricky question, as a developer of multi-platform games I do have some opinions from a mixer’s point of view. The 360 is certainly the least complicated in terms of outputs, it supports Dolby Digital 5.1 and stereo (via optical and HDMI) as well as an analogue stereo output so it is kind of the easier to work with in terms of options and checking the mix. However the PS3 has discreet 7.1 support as well as a whole host of audio output options including DTS and PCM as well as Dolby Digital, which does make it more complex for checking and testing, but also provides more options for the user, particularly the higher-end HD audiophile user. As for the PC, this is potentially the most complicated of the platforms to mix and test for, because you can have any soundcard on the market connected to your PC which means we have to test on a wide variety of cards but can’t always be sure of what end users will be hearing. Having mixed the Xbox version of Prototype first, we then cloned all our mix settings and did a mix pass on the PS3 – fortunately the mix translated very well and I think we only made one or two very minor adjustments. The biggest difference being the difference between our two different compression codecs used: XMA on the 360 and MP3 on the PS3.

DS: I saw an interview with Mark Tuffy of DTS who said that Prototype was the first Xbox 360 game with 7.1 sound.. It’s about neural surround… what do you know about the implementation of that process in Prototype?

RB: I actually know very little about the implementation of this in the game from a technical point of view. What I do know is that it is running the DTS Neural surround code on the Xbox360 (there is an option in the sound menu in the game to turn this on or off) and that it is outputting a 7.1 mix of the game when listening through a receiver with neural enabled. The receiver then basically decodes the extra two back surround channels from the Left and Right surround channels of the regular 5.1 outputs. We mixed the game while monitoring in 7.1 on the Xbox, while always checking how the sound folded down to both 5.1 Dolby Digital and Stereo. The game also runs in 7.1 PCM on the PS3.

DS: In terms of interactive mixing, what aspects would you highlight as most important in the mixing and implementation of interactive audio on Prototype?

RB: Some of the action gets pretty intense pretty quickly in this game. Strike teams are sent into heavily infected zones, the amount of sound playing back is huge and there is essentially a sound for every event and collision occurring, so the game needs to be able to deal with this. It isn’t really part of the mixing system but it plays into it, there are limits specified in our engine on the amount of certain types of sounds that can be played back at any one time, such as dialogue or gun shots, and there is a priority system which gives precedence to some sounds over others. To add to this, the mixer system allows us to finesse certain events such as the shot from the thermobaric tank, whereby we duck down most other sounds to foreground this one huge tank weapon ejection to make it seem like it is much louder than it really is!

DS: I think one of the best features of Prototype sound are the ambiences, there are a lot of those and too much recording of many places… Why does the sound team gave much importance to the ambiences? What is the importance of these in Prototype?

RB: You know, the audio director Scott, has written a superb and detailed article on the ambiences in prototype here that can best answer your question… I really recommend it as there is quite a unique approach to ambience in this game, which I agree, works really well in conveying the feeling of New York.

Prototype Official Website

Four lectures of Rob Bridgett with information and good tips for game audio production, focused on the audio model on Scarface.

1. GDC CANADA 09 – POST PRODUCTION AUDIO PANEL

A moderated panel discussion on game audio between Rob Bridgett from Radical Entertainment (Scarface), Jason Ross from Relic Entertainment (Dawn of War II) and Gordon Durity from Electronic Arts Canada (Def Jam Vendetta) moderated by Leonard Paul of Lotus Audio (Facebreaker). Topics focus on the final stage of game audio schedule such as mixing, mastering, sound replacement, 7.1 surround and last-minute fixes before shipping.

• Intended Audience: Sound directors, sound designers, composers, audio producers and anyone directly involved in the audio production process will benefit from this session. A strong knowledge of game audio is advantageous.
• Idea Takeaway: Attendees learn how the game audio pros polish their audio in the final stages to achieve AAA title audio. An inside look into the techniques of advanced game audio for leading game companies is contrasted and demonstrated.

2. AES 2008 INTERACTIVE MIXING LECTURE

In video game development, audio postproduction is still a concept that is frowned upon and frequently misunderstood. Audio content often still has the same cut-off deadlines as visual and design content, allowing no time to polish the audio or to reconsider the sound in context of the finished visuals. This tutorial talks about ways in which video game audio can learn from the models of postproduction sound in cinema, allotting a specific time at the end of a project for postproduction sound design, and perhaps more importantly, mixing and balancing all the elements of the soundtrack before the game is shipped.

This tutorial will draw upon examples and experience of postproduction audio work we have done over the last two years such as mixing the Scarface game at Skywalker Sound and also more recent titles such as Prototype. The tutorial will investigate:

• Why cutting off sound at the same time as design and art doesn’t work
• Planning and preparing for postproduction audio on a game
• Real-time sound replacement and mixing technology (proprietary and middleware solutions)
• Interactive mixing strategies (my game is 40+ hours long, how do I mix it all?)
• Building/equipping a studio for postproduction game audio.

3. DEVELOP CONFERENCE 2007 – INTERACTIVE MIXING LECTURE

• Dynamic Range: A Study of Software DSP & Run-Time Mixing
• With reference to his work on ‘Scarface: The World Is Yours’,Bridgett will examine the absence of subtlety and silence in the audio of many recent video games, manifested by a lack of dynamic range, over-compression of sound and music assets, and leaving little potential for narrative tension and release

Specific topics will include:

• Production practices in which sound, music and dialogue have been consistently over-compressed at the individual asset level
• Interactive mixing and post-production as a valuable area where dynamics can be artistically controlled via such real-time DSP effects and run-time snapshot mixers to dynamically shape and prioritize the overall sound in an interactive environment
• Delegates will take away a greater understanding of how run-time mixing can re-define the dynamic range of game audio.

4. GDC SAN FRANCISCO 2007 – POST PRODUCTION AUDIO MODEL ON SCARFACE

• Session Description - Scarface used a unique model for its audio, combining conventional audio development from the beginning of the project and augmenting this with a movie-like post-production audio phase at Skywalker Sound. This essentially concentrated on two major elements, sound design and a final mix.
• Post production Sound Design - The audio development team spent a week with Oscar winning sound designer Randy Thom reviewing the game’s audio and took away assets just prior to alpha. Returning two months later with most of those sounds implemented for a final week of concentrated sound effects replacement.
• Post Production Mix - The entire audio development was also taken to a movie mix stage for three weeks where all the sound for the game was mixed. This used unique proprietary technology that allowed a mix control surface to be attached to all the sounds in the game and enabled the game to be mixed by a motion picture mixer Juan Peralta.

The lecture talks about the work flow aspects of taking the audio development off site, as well as the technical and aesthetic advancements made during the Scarface project.

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

Let’s get started with the Rob Bridgett Special, with a exclusive interview for Designing Sound. We talk about his work as sound designer, the evolution of his carreer, and some technical info.

Designing Sound: Hello Rob, first of all: At what point in your life did you decided to start working with sound?

Rob Bridgett: Hi Miguel,I think it is fair to say that I came to actual sound design fairly late, when I was around 27 or 28. I was a musician in various bands during the late 1980′s and early 1990s and eventually left that behind to study cinema at the University of Derby in 1994. The film course at Derby was a theory only course, no practical film-making, it concentrated purely on the analysis of film as text and in that sense it introduced me to a lot of amazing writing about cinema as well as lots of ideas about the language of film. It wasn’t until the third and final year of that degree that I elected to take the Sound & Music module, which was then run by Gianluca Sergi, author of ‘The Dolby Era’. That was the first time that I’d actually realised that the soundtracks to these films were being deliberately composed and mixed from hundreds of tracks, the idea of Foley was one I think I had been aware previously, but until the moment that I was shown the escape scene in ‘The Fugitive’ and made to think about the intricate mix of all the elements in the soundtrack, that it really became something that I wanted to be involved in.

After completing my Bachelor’s degree at Derby I spent some time attempting to get onto the Film Music Master’s programme at the University of Bournemouth. The intake for the course was really selective, I think only around four or five students were selected each year, but I did get an interview. Somehow during the course of the interview I was offered a place on a much newer course that they had only just started one year previously, a Master’s programme called ‘Sound Design for the Moving Image’ (Now called ‘Soundtrack Production: Sound Design for the Screen’). This was in 1998. This was really the beginning of any practical experience in working with sound to picture, and even my first experience of working with sound editing software. I think the biggest and most important aspect, certainly in terms of practical elements of that course, was the fact that the sound students all worked with the animation students and film students on their projects.

The way it was, and still is, set up mimics actual production, so knowledge of working with clients on a collaborative effort became a focus. The course leader, Stephen Deutsch, is very vocal in quoting from his own experiences as a composer in saying that when he started out he’d always thought that film makers were making films for him to put his music onto, but that he quickly learned that the abandonment of the composer’s, or sound designer’s ego is perhaps the biggest lesson to learn about working in the industry. Needless to say there were many other beneficial things to come out of the MA at Bournemouth, but the other main one for me is that the software was pretty much irrelevant. You need to be able to operate the equipment, you need to be technically proficient, but this was only the vehicle with which to convey ideas with sound. All sequencers, Nuendo, Protools, Logic, DP, whatever it is, all essentially do the same thing.

Some are better at certain tasks than others, and people get comfortable with particular environments and work flows, but in the end, and certainly this has been proven out in my short career so far, software changes all the time, from company to company and especially in proprietary audio tools, you need to understand what you want to get out of the tools a lot more than how to go about achieving the sounds technically.

DS: What was the hardest thing for you when you were starting out?

RB: The most challenging thing for me was adjusting from going from a Master’s degree course to starting, effectively, at the bottom in the audio industry as a recording engineer. I’d been learning all these amazing artistic techniques and ideas and coming out of the Master’s degree with a huge amount of student debt, I’d expected to be ‘in demand’ and able to work in film sound and be able to pay off some of that debt. All my friend’s from the animation courses were getting really great jobs in London working on feature films at effects post houses. It was a pretty depressing time, for about 8 months I applied for hundreds of jobs, or just wrote introductory letters to film sound companies trying to get in the door. I actually had one or two interviews with post production sound studios in London and came away pretty deflated and unimpressed.

I had a couple of ‘very nearly’ job offers, at least very interested parties, one in particular I remember was a Audio Motion in Banbury, a large motion-capture facility that had some really exciting facial capture rigs hooked right into the voice recording process, this excited me a lot, and was a lot more in line with what I wanted to be doing. The second ‘nearly’ was at a small production house in Reading called ‘Matinee’. I interviewed for a sound engineer job, but didn’t get it. A few months later they got in touch again and they had another position available, they were particularly interested in my sound design focused skills as not many other engineers were focused or interested in that direction, mostly being more into the music production side, so the sound design aspect did eventually serve me well in setting me apart from the crowd a little. My official title was ‘Recording Engineer’ and recording and editing voice-over was the bulk of the work, but it varied quite a bit, I even did my first game sound design gig with Matinee working on ‘Vanishing Point’ for the Dreamcast. This was in June 2000 and I was there for just over a year before moving into another sound designer position in London working for Antenna Audio, who create interactive museum and gallery guides. Shortly after taking that job I was offered my first in-house audio role at a video games company, at Climax, who were at the time based in Fareham and working on the Xbox exclusive Sudeki RPG, which I had no choice but to take. The job was as composer, sound designer and sound implementer – essentially an ‘audio director plus’ but I think the attitude in those days, even still today to some extent, is that one person could do all this audio on a game.

It was actually a really great opportunity to get experienced in a wide variety of different roles, and many people who entered into the industry around that time will have similar experience of being the audio person for the entire studio and having a hand in everything. Going back and thinking about the film sound jobs that I was looking at around the same time, because that industry was so much more compartmentalised and had very specific audio jobs, it was always difficult to see the bigger picture with film sound, especially at an entry level, which is kind of where my head has always been at since doing the sound design MA. Here in games, suddenly everything I’d been learning about film sound, the ideas and directorial / collaborative aspects of sound on a project were coming into play.

DS: You said that you were a musician in various bands… Do you still compose music? I noticed you have several electronic/experimental albums available on iTunes and Bandcamp… Can you tell us something more about that project?

RB: Yes, I still write a lot of music when I have time, mainly as an escape from the kinds of structures that I’ll be working with on video games. The releases available on iTunes are broadly electronic/ambient. There is a ‘Roomtones’ project which i’ve been working on for around the last three years now, which involves collecting roomtones from various interesting spaces, like Skywalker ranch for example, and augmenting those ambience recordings with some subtle rhythmic interference and tonal elements. The approach for that release in particular is inspired a lot by Chris Watson’s recordings on the Touch label, I really like the way that he organises his field recordings into a narrative on CD. My goal with most tracks is to create a really static atmosphere that allows the listener a lot of space, I hear that the music is very good for insomniacs!

Rob Bridgett at Radical Entertainment 7.1 Sound Studio

DS: I can see that you have worked in several companies first as a sound designer, but your title change as Sound Director in 2003, how was that? Why “Sound Director”?

RB: The change in title coincided with my relocation to Vancouver to work for Radical in August 2003. In game sound, I guess what is known as a ‘Sound Designer’ (a term coined by Walter Murch) on a film is actually the same role as an ‘Audio Director’ or ‘Sound Director’ on a game development team. I think it is in order to gain equality with the Art Director and Technical Director roles in games. So for most of my time on a project I am designing sound effects and implementing those sounds in the game, just as you would expect a sound designer to do, with the additional role of responsibility for the overall soundtrack in the game, dialogue, music, final mix during the whole of production. I typically have a great deal of involvement in shaping and directing how all of those areas work and sound within the game.

The role changes a lot over the course of production actually. These days rather than writing all the music myself, I will hire a composer, and at various points in production different ‘for hire’ skills are required to be brought onto a project. I think we’ll get into this etymology a little more in one of your exclusives later on this month, but its good to make that distinction here that the film term Sound Designer is pretty much the equivalent to Sound Director over here in video game land. Anyway, the term ‘Sound Designer’ was basically the job title back in the UK, and here in North America the title was ‘Audio Director’.

DS: You have spoken several times about the formal-study and University. But .. What do you think about self-taught sound designers? There are many people out there learning by themselves through books, websites, trial-error, etc .. Do you think there are opportunities for them too?

RB: I really do recommend some kind of formal study, whether in music, game design or any kind of sound related field, either technical or theoretical. I also recommend that to compliment any formal study, you get your hands dirty. Teaching yourself, or learning through direct experience of working on projects is just as critical as any theoretical background. When you are working on projects with clients, it’s not really wise to be quoting theory, the people you are working with won’t find that useful, it’s best always to just talk with your collaborators and try things out, leaving the theory for the post-mortems and articles where you can think about the ideas and what they mean with greater clarity, and also with hindsight. There was a good quote, I think from the ‘School of Sound’ in 2007, “Theory without practice is sterile and pratice without theory is blind”. The two absolutely go together in production work.

DS: Has living in Vancouver helped your career?

RB: I’ve had some great opportunities and worked on some great projects here. Vancouver is quite unlike anywhere else in the world for video game development. There is a huge concentration of development here, and even though I have only worked here at Radical in Vancouver, I have many friends and colleagues who also work in town in game audio. There is a good sense of community here, despite everyone working for different publishers, and generally a willingness to help one another out. The game audio community is very small, practically everyone is connected by only a couple of degrees of separation, even more so here in Vancouver.

There are also some very good game audio educational resources here in Vancouver, and they have links to the many developers including Radical. We have hosted tours of the studio for students of the Vancouver Film School and the Vancouver Art Institute as they both have game audio programmes and are more than happy to be as involved as we can be in helping de-mystify the game audio development process for students, most folks working in games today have been in their shoes at some point, and its great to be able to help out. Not only that, but these schools are training up our next generation of talent and we need to bring fresh blood into the industry that can quickly adapt to interactive, non-linear development and proprietary tool environments.

DS: Some people say that video games should stay as “games”. Many others try to take video games to more-realistic levels where you are immersed into the game world, undoubtedly the sound has an important role to play in that process.. Do you have any thoughts in particular about this?

RB: The choice whether or not to follow a cinematic sound direction is almost always dictated by the kind of game being created. The genre of game and the intended audience play huge roles not only in determining the sonic style of the sound design, music and dialogue, but also the amount of compression and output level of the final audio mix. Some game soundtracks sound nothing like motion picture soundtracks and follow entirely different dynamic paths and internal rules. There is always the notion of ‘game-play’, of ‘immersion’ and ‘fun’ in games that sound has a duty to augment. However, repetitive audio that annoys the player or pulls them out of the fun in the moment is always a concern.

This is not dissimilar to the role that sound plays in film, to support the story and characters, and above all for the elements of production to remain invisible and non-distracting to the audience. Games in certain genres have already forged their own aesthetic and are certainly not aesthetically tied to film in any way. There is certainly no danger to games from film, new game types and genres are being released all the time and very few have anything remotely to do with cinema sound style other than having well produced and balanced audio. A great deal of the ‘blockbuster’ titles, such as Call of Duty, Halo, GTA, are all concerned with what I like to call ‘cinematization’, in that their style and presentation are very similar to motion picture sound design and take a great deal of influence from film for their style. Orchestral scores written by film composers, detailed and bespoke sound effects design and dialogue that is produced to sound like it does in Hollywood action films, are all elements of this cinematization of style. Personally, this is a style I particularly enjoy in games, it is getting to the point where you can put a game side by side with an action sequence in a film and have trouble telling the difference.

At the high end, the mix levels are now similar, sample rates are effectively the same, the dynamics and the lack of dialogue scenes are perhaps the only things that still give away the difference, but this style of game is heading in a good direction.

DS: The levels, I also wanted to ask about this .. We all know about the growing problem of dynamic range and sound levels on videogames. How do you treat this problem at work? What is the position of Radical Entertainment in the mixing and mastering processes?

RB: We mix at a reference listening level of 79dB and aim for dialogue peaks of around -12 or at most -4dB. I am currently working with the IESD group in an attempt to publish a receommendation sheet for these basic mixing and listening levels when doing a final mix on a title. Hopefully, more info on this should be available within the next 6 months or so.

DS: How do you see the sound in the video games today? What do you think could be the next step?

RB: We have a huge range of genres in games right now, with so many different sonic styles, I only see that getting wider and of higher quality. There are trends towards and away from cinematic presentation happening simultaneously. There will be bigger and bigger budgets on a few titles like there are with Hollywood movies, and there will also be smaller and smaller budgets in other areas of the industry as there are with independent movies, and they will all do interesting and unique things with sound as a part of their experience. Right now we have some superb interactive mixing technology in games, which is something that wasn’t around for the last generation of games.

We’ll see more realtime manipulation of sounds at run-time, more processing power allowing more DSP and more available voices. This will mean that less and less manipulation need be done ‘offline’ in the production of the sound, dialogue and music, and more ‘online’ rule based implementation and sound design will probably occur. Again, I’m not sure what genres of games this will benefit more than others. I still see the availability of more time at the end of production for sound to iterate, mix and polish as being missing right now from game producer’s consciousness, but it is getting there.

DS: Do you like the work that young sound designers are doing today? How do you see the current and next generation of sound designers?

RB: It feels kind of premature to talk about younger sound designers or a next generation of game sound designers when the current generation are only really just getting started, or at least that’s how it feels. If you are an audio director in-house with a developer, you may only get to work on one project every three years. That’s an incredibly slow work rate, when you consider freelancers who only may work on one small part of a game’s soundtrack, can notch up as many as 3 or 5 credits a year, sometimes more, and similarly film sound designers who can work on a similar number of projects in a year. This is because the development of audio in a game is a full-time job right from the beginning of production until the end and seeing that process through is a very big commitment.

DS: What are your main “weapons” in the studio?

RB: I currently use Nuendo as a DAW along with Altiverb reverbs, speakerphone and Waves plug-ins. Soundminer is also essential as my main source fast access to sample libraries. These are pretty much the basics, from there anything goes – it comes down to whatever can I get my hands on to get the sounds I need, but really the majority of sound manipulation I do on a regular basis is combining library and bespoke sounds and using slight pitch alteration, EQ, and fade in and out envelopes, that’s 90% of the sound design and sound editing work, no tricks really, just working with the material.

Rob Bridgett at Radical Entertainment 7.1 Sound Studio

DS: Do you use proprietary software to work with sound at Radical Entertainment?

RB: Yes. We have a proprietary audio engine and interface called ‘Audio Builder’. We’ve used it here at Radical for the last 10 or so years as far as I can tell, it has gone through many different iterations. We have found that there is a distinct advantage in such in-house tools in that the code can very quickly be changed to suit the exact needs of a particular project, our tools team generally only supports one or two teams worth of feature requests. Pretty much any kind of sound implementation you can dream up can be achieved with such custom built systems.

We also have a proprietary dialogue database called UDO (Universal Dialogue Organizer), it is a stand-alone component from the audio engine and is pipeline agnostic so could be used with any audio engine or game engine pipeline, it helps for us to have all our dialogue in one place from the beginning of the project to the end. Having said that about proprietary tools, third party tools are so much more fully featured today than they were 5 or 10 years ago, and they have to be, I actually think some of the third party tools are getting into more sophisticated areas of development now that allow sound designers and implementers to build more unique objects and content through more modular systems, which is exciting.

DS: For you what is the most important process in the creation of sound for video games?

RB: Sitting down with various members of the design team, coders or art team, working directly with them and collaborating on the game is absolutely crucial. This is the part of the job that never gets depicted in and rarely talked about in audio focused interviews or features, and this is really where most of the sound designer’s work happens, not in the studio.

DS: Are you influenced by certain sound designer/artist in particular? Someone you admire?

RB: The thing I like about sound design, and about very good sound designers is that there is little in the way of a signature style that you can point to and say, oh that’s the work of Walter Murch or Ren Klyce, they leave their egos at the door and work towards benefiting the film. The same can be said of really proficient sound designers and audio directors working in games, these people are known for good, solid quality work and effective sound design, not sonic styles. It is always great when boundaries are pushed and new things are done, in production as much as in the finished game, but that can’t occur all the time for every title. I admire the work of a lot of my peers in the industry, Tom Colvin (Ninja Theory), Kenny Young (Media Molecule), I also love listening to (and playing) the work coming out of Ubisoft’s Montreal studio as well as the work done recently by EA’s Don Veca.

All these guys are doing great things and working really hard at what they do, and they are more often than not writing about it and sharing ideas and production techniques, which I admire a great deal. Going back to film sound, I admire and respect the work of Randy Thom a great deal, one of the high points in my career was to get to work with him directly. I’m also greatly inspired by his role as an ambassador for sound in all media, especially film, but equally in video games, he sees the potential and opportunities in games for great sound; this comes across clearly in the video interview I did with him for Scarface, which I believe you have a link to on your site somewhere.

DS: How long you play video games? What are your favorite titles of all time?

RB: I’ve played since the early 1980′s. I’ve grown up with games as an influence from arcades to the ZX Spectrum and all the way through to the current consoles. I have a great nostalgia for some of the old Spectrum games like Manic Miner, Sabre Wulf, Jet Set Willy and Highway Encounter, but I think that’s just a nostalgia thing, although I do still play those games every now and again on an emulator and they are still fun and I can;t believe how difficult some of them were! A lot of the game I currently enjoy are probably not games that I’d like to have worked on. often the process of working on a game for 2 – 3 years means that you probably don’t ever want to play that game again in your life. I think favourite games are like favourite movies, they change all the time depending on what you are looking for at that moment. I do always come back to GTA though! – Their cut-scenes, story, presentation and open-world game-play is so well executed, they are so far ahead of anything anyone is doing right now in that genre.

DS: I know you’re writing a book. Could you tell something more about this?

RB: Yeah, the book is going to be out early 2010. It is a collection of various articles that I’ve published over the last ten years, all freshly edited along with a great deal of previously unpublished and new articles. There is no technical information in the book and it isn’t a beginner’s guide to sound, the focus, and I guess the theme you can draw underneath all my writing, is the creative and production process – in particular the connections between film sound and game sound. There is a rich lineage and heritage that game sound has inherited from film sound, among other media, and the book explores those themes and connections. For me, writing is a huge part of the process of developing sound for games. I document things that I come across that I think may be common problems that need some kind of solution, or at the very least to be able to share something for which I cannot find any reading material. It also helps me to think about various production issues and to understand them, somehow getting them down on paper and trying to clarify them is a big part of the process for me.

DS: Finally, could you tell us something about your future projects?

RB: I am currently working as audio director on an unnanounced project right now with Radical. Aside from the ‘day job’, I’m also working with the IESD on the reference level standards document and as well as editing the book for release in early next year.

Do you want to make some questions to Rob? Just send your questions! More info here

Were you expecting good game audio special? Here is it: Rob Bridgett, featuring really amazing stuff about game audio, covering publications and articles created previously by him and several exclusive interviews/articles for Designing Sound. The special will include technical articles, lectures and info about the sound of games like Scarface, Prototype, Vanishing Point and 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, plus a dedicated post to answer questions of the readers, more info soon!

Bio

Rob Bridgett is senior audio director at Radical Entertainment in Vancouver, BC. In 1993 he attended Derby University to study cinema and media, after which he was one of the first to graduate from the ‘Sound Design for the Moving Image’ Master’s degree programme at Bournemouth University in 1999.

Bridgett began working as a sound designer and recording engineer in June 2000 at Matinee Sound & Vision in Reading, UK. It was here that he worked on the sound design for his first video game Vanishing Point for the Dreamcast console. After briefly working as a sound designer for Antenna Audio in London, Bridgett entered into his first full-time in-house role as sound designer & composer for Climax Entertainment, then based in Fareham, UK. Since 2003, Bridgett has been an audio director at Radical Entertainment in Vancouver.

While working as a sound designer and audio director for games, Bridgett has become a committed writer, speaker and evangelist for the promotion of sound in video games, with publications in a wide variety of journals, books and magazines. A strong advocate of cinematic production techniques, in 2006 he worked closely with Randy Thom pioneering the post-production sound design and mix for Vivendi’s Scarface video game at Skywalker Ranch.

Rob is an advisory board member for the Game Audio Network Guild and the Interactive Entertainment Sound Developers group, as well as a program advisor for Recording Arts programs at the Art Institute of Vancouver and the MA in Soundtrack Production at Bournemouth University in the UK.

Featured Work

• Prototype (2009) – Sound mixer and cut-scene sound design
• 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (2009) – Sound director
• ‘World In Conflict: Soviet Assault’ (2009) – Additional sound design
• Crash: Mind Over Mutant (2008) – Sound mixer
• TimeShift (2007) – Cut-scene sound design
• Crash of the Titans (2007) – Additional sound design
• World in Conflict (2007) – Additional sound design
• Scarface: The World Is Yours (2006) – Sound director
• Pocket Mini Golf 2 – Composer
• Pop Drop – Composer
• Sudeki (2004) – Sound designer
• Serious Sam: Next Encounter (2004) – Sound designer
• Vanishing Point (2000) – Sound designer

Some Publications

• ‘Casting the Net’, Studio Sound Magazine, October 2001
• ‘On a Different Note’, Develop Magazine, October 2001
• ‘Contemporary Sound Design for the Web’, Computer Arts Special Magazine, January 2002
• ‘Sound Design’, featured producer & cover feature, Computer Music Magazine. March 2002
• ‘Interactive Music’, cover feature for Computer Music Magazine September 2002
• ‘Subtlety and Silence’, Create Online Magazine, October 2002
• ‘Citizen Kane: Sound as Expressionist Device’, Cinema Audio Society Journal, November 2002
• ‘Shock & Awe: Surround Sound’, feature & tutorial for Computer Music Magazine, March 2004
• ‘Computer Music Without Limits’, Computer Music Magazine, October 2005
• ‘Re-inventing the Wheel’, Develop Magazine, October 2006
• ‘Scarface: Post Production’, cover feature for Audio Media Magazine, November 2006
• ‘Interactive Ambience’, guest columnist for Aural Fixation, Game Developer Magazine, April 2007
• ‘Sound Has an Image Problem’, MCV Magazine, October 2007
• ‘Dynamic Range: Subtlety and Silence in Video Game Sound’, ‘From Pac Man to Pop Music’, Collins, K (Ed)
• ‘Is Vancouver the Hollywood of Games?’ Develop Magazine, November 2008
• ‘Considering the Aesthetics of Surround Music in Games’, Shockwave Sound, January 2009
• ‘Hollywood Sound’, Chapter 57, ‘A Film Music History Reader’, University of California Press, 2010
• ‘Sound Direction Practices’, ‘The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics’, Claudia Gorbman et al (Eds) 2010
• ‘From the Shadows of Film Sound’ (working title) 2010

Rob Bridgett Website
Rob Bridgett at IMDb
Rob Bridgett at Twitter

Photos by: Maria Isaac

“The game spent five weeks being mixed in the same way that a Hollywood motion picture is mixed: balancing dialogue, sound effects and music on a THX-calibrated sound stage at Skywalker — something that has never been achieved before in video game production and ensuring every sound will be heard as the developers intended it.”

Academy Award winner Randy Thom served as lead sound designer, in his first work in the video game space.

“Scarface: The World Is Yours will deliver a surprising audio experience that will add life and power to the experience of playing as the one-and-only Tony Montana,” said Randy Thom. “By bringing the game and its developers to Skywalker Sound and remixing the game on-site, we were able to create a more detailed and engaging audio experience that goes beyond what other games have achieved.”

This is a part of an entire post on Team xBox with some information about the sound mixing of the game realized at Skywalker Sound Studios.

Here is an interesting interview with Randy Thom, talking about the sound of Scarface video game:

You can know all about the sound of Scarface at Gamasutra on this amazing article with all the information about the sound of the game.

Scarface Official Web Site