Symbolic Sound has published on their blog called “the eight nerve”, an interview with sound designer Sylvain Lasseur talking about his use of Kyma system and several aspects about his work.

Sound designer Sylvain Lasseur is not just bi-coastal; he’s bi-contintental, working part time in Paris and part time in Los Angeles!  We recently had a chance to ask him a few questions about how he uses Kyma for 5.1 sound design and to explore some of the differences between post production work in Paris and Los Angeles.  By the end of the interview, the discussion turns to food, wine, and the Marx Brothers.  Read on!

In this exclusive SoundWorks Collection video profile, producer Michael Coleman sits down with the oscar nominated sound team of HUGO including co-supervising sound editor Philip Stockton, co-supervising sound editor Eugene Gearty, and re-recording mixer Tom Fleischman.

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Brian Selznick’s award-winning novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret stars Asa Butterfield, as an orphan boy who lives in a Parisian train station. Sent to live with his drunken uncle after his father’s death in a fire, Hugo learned how to wind the massive clocks that run throughout the station. When the uncle disappears one day, Hugo decides to maintain the clocks on his own, hoping nobody will catch on to him squatting in the station.

His natural aptitude for engineering leads him to steal gears, tools, and other items from a toy-shop owner who maintains a storefront in the station. Hugo needs these purloined pieces in order to rebuild a mechanical man that was left in the father’s care at the museum — the restoration was a project father and son did together.

SoundWorks Collection

In the latest episode of the Game Audio Podcast, the panel (which includes guests Shannon Potter [Sounddelux DMG], Kristen Quebe [Microsoft Games Studios] and Fryda Wolff [Turtle Rock Studios] ) discuss the varied entry routes taken by audio designers getting into the Games Industry, as well as discussion on the diversity in games studios.

Listen to the podcast, or download it here

Article by Jeff Seamster.

Jeff had originally wanted to include this during his feature month this past December. Circumstances conspired against it, but thankfully he wasn’t willing to give up. So, now we have another great article to share with you. Enjoy!

Make a quick list of your 5 favorite video games or films in terms of sound design. I’ll wager they all have something in common; strong audio direction and a cohesive audio aesthetic. This isn’t due to some happy accident or last minute thinking during the post-production process. A successful audio aesthetic requires thoughtful planning and documentation coupled with deliberate execution and course correction.

Why is it important?

Discussions of games like BioShock, Ico, Limbo or movies like Blade Runner, The Matrix and Toy Story will inevitably include references to strong visual direction and style. That strong and consistent direction makes it easy for an audience to interpret, absorb and connect with their favorite works. There’s no reason this can’t be true for audio as well. Achievements in audio aesthetic don’t get as much coverage as those in the visual arts, but there are concepts and practices that can guide audio professionals toward that same level of achievement.

Cohesive aesthetic is our best strategy for creating memorable experiences. By wrapping our audience in a well-conceived and unified soundscape, the work at large becomes memorable even if that soundscape seems complex or alien at first. Repetition and shared vocabulary are tools that can be used to reinforce that influence. We’re all trying to create an aural experience that results in immediate recall of our titles years after the initial experience.

The narrative and visual teams on any given project will have their own agendas and aesthetic motivations. When integrated with these other disciplines in a game or film production, cohesive audio aesthetic will result in a work that is stronger and more memorable overall. This is how our touchstone achievements are born.

What makes up an audio aesthetic?

An audio aesthetic is constructed from sound principles, reference and guidelines that inform design and content creation decisions all the way from the overarching project down to the level of individual assets. When talking with other audio professionals, I refer to these as our design pillars, common vocabulary, and style bible.

The first task in developing an audio aesthetic is defining design pillars for the entire project. These are the types of content, techniques and styles upon which the game or film will rely most heavily. Content types may include character voiceover, ambient sound and music. Pillars of technique might include stylistic counterpoint, hyper-realism and anthropomorphism. A project will typically have one or two style pillars, often tied to the project’s visual style. These style pillars could include directions such as “Cyberpunk” or “Gothic”. Altogether, design pillars should put you in a position to describe the audio aesthetic for your title succinctly. If your design includes more than a handful of these pillars, it might be worth performing a reassessment to make sure the design isn’t becoming muddled stylistically.

In order to communicate about aesthetic effectively with your audio team, it’s worth developing a library of reference and common vocabulary early on in the project. This vocabulary is used to further refine the project’s sonic identity and can be extracted from multiple points of reference including films, games, books and music. Your references can and probably should be shared by multiple disciplines on the project. Descriptions for common vocabulary would read something like “Gritty explosions: (see Battlefield 3)”, “Visceral fight scenes like the Bourne movies” or “The foreboding ambience of Se7en”.

Once design pillars and common vocabulary have been established, I like to condense these ideas into a “style bible” that can be easily understood and referenced by the existing audio team, newly hired audio personnel and external, non-audio teams alike. The style bible provides detail on the project’s aesthetic direction as well as guides and constraints for content creation. Detailed aesthetic direction should include elaboration upon design pillars as well as specific points of reference within the project’s common vocabulary. These specific points of reference will take the form of video clips and audio files including a brief writeup of how the material in these clips applies to the project. Content creation guidelines can direct toward style and technique (i.e. “50’s sci-fi”, “compress, but leave some breathing room”) or even away from them (i.e. “avoid synthesized sounds”, “no spring reverb”). A comprehensive style bible will reach beyond the field of sound design and into the areas of voiceover and music.

Documenting your vision

As I mentioned earlier, the documentation of an audio aesthetic should be simple and easily understandable by all disciplines on a project, not just the audio team. But it should be easy to express your direction without a document as well. If the audio direction for a project can’t be conveyed verbally and clearly to other team members and creative leadership, then it may need refinement. Periodic meetings with the audio team that specifically discuss aesthetic will help with this refinement while keeping the team informed of stylistic shifts and changes.

Once the direction has been refined, it’s time to begin construction of your style bible in a format that’s easy to edit and easy to share. The written portion could be a source-controlled Word document or Google Doc if you have multiple editors working on the document simultaneously. If you have a team in which members are given categorical focus (i.e. voiceover, combat, ambience), invite each member to review and develop the section upon which he or she will be focused.

Design pillars will act as the commandments of your style bible and should be documented with no more than a couple of sentences. After you’ve got those down, document your common vocabulary and stylistic references with links to video and audio files. Keep reference material local whenever possible as you never know when an online video capture or sound file will suddenly disappear. If a reference from a game, movie, or television show is given solely as an audio file, try to include at least a screencap of the video source to help team members get a frame of reference. Finally, document your content creation guidelines with write-ups for each category of sound along with corresponding processing and mastering techniques. For added clarity, link your document to some individual, mastered assets along with the audio projects used to create them. These projects should be clearly organized and they should serve as examples of departmental standards, both technical and creative.

A very popular practice that should be borrowed from our visual counterparts in game development is that of the art room. Game artists create an art room as a fully realized example of a game’s style in terms of setting, scale, lighting, decoration, coloration and more. Game audio professionals can mirror this practice by creating a menagerie of game characters and settings with sound or even a fully playable level with comprehensive audio treatment including mastering and mix. For those of us in film sound, the art room can be a 5-10 minute segment that is representative of the overall audio aesthetic for the production. Whatever the format of your art room, it must be an easy to use and accurate reference for those creating additional content for the project.

When should you create your audio aesthetic?

The short answer is “As early as possible”. If you have the good fortune to be involved on a game or film during the pre-production process, experiment and isolate your aesthetic during this time to free up the rest of the project for pure content creation. For those of you strictly working in post-production, spend at least a little time assembling, if not a style bible, a style handbook to inform your team and your decisions during the intense post-production window. My short answer continues with “and as you go.” Whether you are involved from the start or only at the tail end, aesthetic is a moving target that can evolve, even if just slightly, right up until the project is wrapped.

Keep it flexible. Keep it safe.

Even if you and your team are confident in the direction for a project, that direction should be flexible. You may realize later in the development cycle that your aesthetic isn’t necessarily working and the creative heading for a project can change, sometimes drastically. When developing your sound and compiling your style bible, keep in mind they should never be so static that one or more components cannot be replaced, shifted or removed. Yes, it can be a pain to retread work that is already done, but preparation for design shifts outside of audio will lessen the sting if and when it actually happens.

Equally important as being flexible is being critical and honest about your own work. Think of it like a voice actor spot checking accent over the course of a production. Regular confirmation and course correction of your audio aesthetic is the only way to guarantee that your vision will make it through to the final product. Naturally, this is a more time consuming aspect of the job on a 20+ hour game than it is on a 2-hour film, but it is no less valuable a practice in either format.

Not just a big budget issue

If you’re thinking to yourself, “This seems like more of an issue for major motion picture and large scale games”, I encourage you to reconsider. It could be said that aesthetic development is even more important for smaller productions since they have less production time and a shorter window with their audiences to establish a unique sonic identity. Regardless of the budget, duration and scale of your project, developing cohesive aesthetic is a practice that pays off every time. Start small, keep it tight and go make history.

All kinds and thicknesses of ice was recorded and at many different temperatures. It was kicked, cracked, hit with a sledgehammer, crushed into itself and smacked with heavy chunks of ice. Ice debris was dropped and tossed around at many locations for a unbeatable, multiple take set of crash effects. When all these styles of frozen water and air vapor are pitched around with your favorite audio mangling tool, you will be amazed at the broad spectrum of sounds that can be created with the ultra high frequency response of the microphones.

Sound designer John Leonard has started an independent sfx library called ImmersiveFX. There are two releases available at the moment and for being reader of Designing Sound, you can get a special discount price. Use the code DFSX50 and you’ll get 50% off on both libraries:

• Sounds of Flight - An eclectic collection from my extensive archive Jumbo Jets, Military Fighters, War-birds, Helicopters and Bi-Planes From an F-16 to a Tiger Moth – it’s all here. 48/16 WAV files with embedded Soundminer Metadata – $25
• The Voice of Poseidon - 101 effects of seascapes and some river and waterfall sounds. From the gentle waves on a sandy beach to the crash of breakers on the Pacific shore. 48/24 WAV files with embedded Soundminer Metadata – $80

Sound recordist Mikkel Nielsen runs a library called Sonic Salute, where he has released four sound collections so far:

• Metal Scrap – 97 stereo/MS recordings of metals. Clink/clank/crash/boom
• The Shipyard – 16 stereo/MS recordings captured in the summer of 2011, at the commercial port of Copenhagen. The area is filled with giant cranes, trucks, and containers, and is closed to the public.
• Pigs FX – 246 recordings of all kinds of pigs, recorded at Pigfarm Esrumgaard, which has close to 1000 pigs of all ages and sizes.
• Footsteps Snow - 25 minutes of long walks in cold and snowy conditions. Recorded during tree winters from 2009 to 2011 in a remote deserted Swedish forest, miles away from the nearest road.

EFX has new changes on the site and also a new library: Colombian Countryside, including 35 nature atmospheres recorded and remasterized at 48 kHz 24-bit.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Affordable Audio 4 Everyone has released The Hud Menu Interface Toolbox, a library of 700 interface sounds. All proceeds above $5 will go to The National Federation of the Blind.

The Hud Menu Interface Toolbox features various sounds that can be used for various menus, Game HUD’s, and also small object interface interactions. It is a great tool for building, and creating response sounds to player interations, or for any type setting that may need some additional sounds for a character or actor to make when interacting with something.

Click here to view the embedded video.

BOOM Library has released free Flamethrower SFX pack.

Remember the video from Chad Thunberg, who really knows how to do some little DIY-Engineering? He’s the guy that built an epic FLAMETHROWER out of plastic pipes and a garden hose. Luckily for us, Axel was around to point the microphone towards this “eternal flame”. Guess what: It sounded just awesome. We gave these SFX away for free during our advent calendar weeks. This awesome SFX pack is now available for EVERYBODY.

It’s still Elliott Koretz’ month here at Designing Sound and here’s a story on one of his most prolific collaborations, with director Michael Mann. In this interview, Elliott shares stories about working methods, the use of music and silence and Mann’s tireless search for perfection. Enjoy!

How did you and Michael Mann meet the first time?

My association with Michael actually goes way back to “Miami Vice” the tv show. I was an editor on it for the pilot and for two seasons. But my relationship as a supervisor started with his later tv show, “Robbery Homicide Division”. I interviewed with him and ended up getting the show. I then went on to “Collateral” and “Miami Vice”. We had a number of discussions about “Public Enemies” but ultimately I had another commitment on a different film that prevented me from doing it.

How would you describe him as a collaborator and filmmaker?

I think his track record in both tv and film speaks for itself. He has been an innovator for many years. I think one of the marks of greatness is when you are channel surfing and come across a film and even though you may have seen it countless times you stop and watch it. I find I do that with many of Michael’s films. It’s very exciting working with him. I think those of us that work with him are drawn in knowing every project has that potential for greatness. Michael is the definition of a tireless worker and the challenge is to keep up with him. He works himself harder than any director I know. His demands are many and it’s important to be mentally prepared to present him your best at all times. He has many ideas about sound and expects them to be addressed as quickly as possible. It’s very important for me to be clearly communicating this information to my crew. No question it is truly challenging working for and with him but I do understand that his intensity is in the quest for his ideal soundtrack.

You’ve collaborated on two feature films. Quite often, sound can be very tricky to talk about – how did you communicate about sound and how did your dialogue evolve throughout the process of making the two movies?

That’s a good question. Before I started designing on “Collateral” Michael called me into his office one day. He was still shooting the movie and wanted me to hear the production sound on a certain scene. It was the scene in the alleyway where Jaimie Foxx is tied to the steering wheel of his taxi and Tom Cruise comes out of a building and finds that some petty criminal has stolen his briefcase from the back seat. Tom ends up shooting the guy. The alleyway was between a tall apartment building and a large above ground parking structure. The resonant sounds of the gunshots were amazing even with blanks. Michael said, “This is the sound I want here”. I did some sweeetning to the impact of the shots but the final mix contained that same production echo. It’s really cool. I think this is a good example of Michael’s clarity in certain aspects of the sound track. He will be very clear and specific about what he is looking for. To that end he has been very generous with giving me access to do extensive field recordings for his films to facilitate that and I will speak on that subject more later on. But to address the question directly, the process I found worked best with Michael was to introduce sound elements via the Avid as early as possible. I would cut sequences, crash them down to make them Avid friendly and get that material over to the picture department to integrate into their cut. I think watching the film and hearing my material in that environment got him comfortable with the sound early in the post-production process. If he embraced it in the cutting room it really helped on the dub stage later. We would also have more traditional “spotting” sessions. My crew and I would screen reels with Michael and he would give notes along the way.

Michael Mann’s films are often very dependent on music and sound for their emotional impact. How much sound is written into his scripts?

Well the scripts were a good starting point for me to start thinking about what I needed to do. They were often very descriptive about the literal sound of the film. By that I mean very specific vehicles, weapons, and devices used in the story as well as the environments of each scene. I think the subjective design aspects of each film came more from viewing the movie and getting a sense of the flow of the picture editing.

How early on were you involved in the films? And what were your schedules?

I was fortunate that I started both “Collateral” and “Miami Vice” while they were still shooting. That gave me the ability to do a couple of very important things. First, to start getting my design sounds into the Avid very early in the process and secondly to get out to sets and have access to record. Both films were long post schedules and I think I was on for just about six months on each.

Mann actually started out working in documentaries. How important is realism to the sound design of Mann’s movies?

Very important. And that leads to my field recording. On “Collateral” we recorded every gun in the movie. We recorded the taxi. We recorded the metro trains for the film’s ending. These all were very detailed recording sessions with many mikes and multiple recorders. They were expensive to do but of incredible value to the sound of the movie. One of the more unusual outings occurred when I went out with my assistant, Bruce Barris, for an all night recording session in downtown Los Angeles. Our goal was to get recordings of the sounds one might hear at 3am. Now let me say 3am in downtown Los Angeles is quite interesting. There are many homeless people who sleep on the streets. It is an unfortunate reality and we tried to not intrude on anybody’s dignity. We recorded at a discreet distance the voices of the night. This material was used in the movie during the scenes after the first kill when Jamie realizes he is driving around with an assassin and the tension is high.

On “Miami Vice” I had the opportunity to fly down to Miami while they were shooting and do extensive recordings. We rented an airstrip and used it to record all the major autos in the film including a brand new Ferrari that wasn’t even available in the US yet. We had a few days with the speedboats and staged our own races recording bys and onboards. On one of the days at sea the lead speedboat driver (who turned out to be a reigning world champion) offered to run the boat out to Bimini for lunch. It’s 53 miles off the Miami coast and at full throttle it wouldn’t take very long to get there. Ultimately the assistant director accompanying us said no because he thought Michael wouldn’t approve. That and the fact we didn’t have our passports ended that little adventure. We also did some onboard recordings of a unique experimental airplane used in the film.

Recording the plane is an amusing story to share. Let me first describe the situation. This plane, an Adams A-500 was a very cool looking small airplane that had a featured role in a scene where our undercover heroes are smuggling some drugs into the country. Because it was so small we couldn’t be onboard while they were shooting but we did rig up our recorders and mikes and instructed the actors how to hit record and stop on the machines. The pilot (a real pilot made up to look like one of our leads) was very impatient and wanted us off the plane so he could get going. We finished what we needed to do, though not soon enough for him, and left to get to an airstrip where the plane was to fly over at what we were told treetop level for part of the smuggling sequence. We had two positions to record from at the field. My assistant was on one side of the runway and I stood in the middle but back towards the end of it. The plane came in and headed straight towards me. I stood with my shotgun mike in hand. The plane was so low I could clearly see the pilots face. Evidently he had decided that treetop level wasn’t good enough he had dropped down and came right at me just a few feet above the ground. I held my stance for as long as possible and then hit the deck. However being the professional that I am I held the mike up and got the recording. I heard later that the radio chatter from the pilot indicated he knew exactly what he was doing.

Once I edited out the “Oh Shit” it was a great close up recording.

These types of recording opportunities do not happen very often and I benefited from the fact that both movies had pretty decent budgets. I think this gives you a little insight into what Michael prioritizes when thinking about sound in his film.

As songs and music have such an important role in Mann’s movies do you collaborate more closely with the music supervisors and editors than on the usual Hollywood films where the two departments rarely meet until the mix? I read that on Collateral the song Shadow On the Sun was used already when shooting the scene with the coyotes in front of the cab.

You are correct. Music is a huge part of the sound of Michael’s movies. There was quite a bit of collaboration between our departments.We were all in the same building actually.  It’s really critical to know where the music is working and in what frequencies. Then we can compliment each other and not fight for the same sonic space.

I’ve read that he’s really hands-on in the mixing process. What is he like on the dub stage?

Michael comes to the stage really well prepared. He has notebooks put together in preproduction and during the filming that have his thoughts behind every scene. He references those throughout the dub. He works very closely with the dialog mixer and is active in crafting the subtle nuances that a db up or down can help sell. I think it’s fair to say it’s an intense experience for the mixers because of this attention to detail.

I like the way you utilize silence or near-silence in subjective ways in both Collateral and Miami Vice. How many of these decisions are made during the sound editing and how many during the mixing?

A little of both I think. There are definitely moments that are designed up front for dramatic effect. Silence preceding a big action piece is quite effective. I think it draws the audience into the world we have created. And so some of that is indeed planned. But there is always room for experimentation on the dub stage. Sometimes Michael would have new ideas for us to pursue. Sometimes a change in music would lead to a new sonic direction with a scene.

At the opposite end of silence, Miami Vice had some of the most intense, hefty gun sounds I can remember – actually one of the few other sequences that equal those is the shootout in Heat. What is it about Mann and gun sounds? And how did you get those Miami Vice effects?

The guns in Vice were actually a blend of production guns, library fx and a reworking of the Collateral gun recording sessions. For the big shootout scene near the end of the film our assistants went through every production take from the shootout and build a cutting library. That is what the bed of o/s shots were made from as well as some of the close up weapons. The design was inspired by the sounds of the news footage of the North Hollywood shootout. It was very much a news/documentary type feeling. The close up guns also had some layered library sounds. Then add the ricco’s, zip bys, impacts, debris and it’s a really effective sequence.

Both Collateral and Miami Vice are very nocturnal movies. Did that influence the use of sound?

Yes. We were extremely specific with every sound in both movies particularly with the night sequences. What I mean by specific is each sound cut in these scenes was really thought out. No background recordings just rolled in. Nothing superfluous. We would ask ourselves what was the motivation behind each of these elements? What really happens at night? With the long schedule we were able to fine tune and really think out what was important. I think this process is a great way to design in general, and certainly for the night time scenes the spare nature of the tracks added a great deal of suspense to the overall mood.

Has Mann mentioned some specific inspirations for his use of sound?

Not really. I know he is quite a student of film history but our conversations were much more directed to the specifics of what he wanted for the particular film and not so much about his motivation behind it.

He seems to be extremely committed to his work. Inspiring or scary?

Yes.

Seriously, as you may have gathered and to repeat what I said before, he is most definitely a challenging guy to work for. I think he is always searching for perfect moments. He pushes himself extremely hard and you as a supervisor have to understand how to keep your crew sharp through the long hours and through the pressure packed needs to feed the stage with up to the minute conformed materials. It’s a pretty relentless pursuit for long stretches of time and you really need to be psychologically ready to be onboard for the ride.

I am very appreciative of the opportunities Michael has given me. I am very proud of the work we have done and I leave open the door to possible future collaborations.

Rob Bridgett has released a digital ePub version his book “From the Shadows of Film Sound“. It’s available now at $9,99.

As a practitioner in video game development, Rob Bridgett has explored and written about the connective tissue between film sound production and a newly emerging video game audio production culture. This new volume brings together, for the first time, freshly edited writings with many previously unpublished articles, documenting his work and thinking over the past ten years. This book is equally suited to film sound designers intrigued by game sound production as much as those in game sound wishing to further explore the meaning of cinematic sound. A fresh, insightful, and long overdue volume offering nourishment for students of sound as well as ammunition for sound artists working on the front line of development.

Buy it here. Printed version is available at Blurb.

You can also check the interview we did in 2010 when the book was released.

The episode #14 of the game audio podcast is available for download now.

In this episode we discuss story telling techniques and development, get our geek on with control surfaces and try to solve some music challenges. Anton & Damian are joined by our special guests:

Mike Morasky – Valve
Emily Ridgway – Emily Industries
Lucas van Tol –  Guerrilla Games

Listen

Soniccouture has started an interesting crowd-source project called CrowdChoir.

We are going to build a unique sampler instrument  – a choir / vocal ensemble made with hundreds of voices from all around the world.

We need a a minimum of 500 notes to layer in the instrument, so please help us if you can.

Everybody that sends us a recorded note will receive the CrowdChoir instrument free, in Kontakt /EXS & Ableton Live format.

The project will run for 2 months, until March 31st 2012

One participant chosen at random will receive a custom-made, 5 octave cherry-wood bcustom array mbra (worth $2000)

The Sound of Hotel for Dogs.