Square Enix has published on his blog a post by Erick Ocampo, who talks about the sound design of “Front Mission Evolved”, talking about his work on the Wanzer robots. He also talks about working with our featured sound designer Erik Aadahl, who participated in the creation of the sounds of the video game.
My name is Erick Ocampo, I am the Sound Designer on Front Mission Evolved. When I first found out I was going to work on a Square Enix game I was super excited! My main focus on the project was Wanzer sound effects and cinematics. I really wanted to capture the essence of each Wanzer pilot and bring out their personalities with vocal-like movement sounds for their Wanzer. I used a variety of sounds such as lions, male vocals, servos, farm animals, metal creaks, brass instruments, whales, and processed them with various plug-ins and other effect processors. My goal was to say clear of generic servo movement sounds and give these Wanzers a much more sophisticated feel.
Another important part of Front Mission Evolved is the story told by the detailed and action packed cinematics. I’ve always felt that sound for game cinematics should be up to par with the audio in a high budget film. There is about an hour and a half of highly complex-intense battle scenes, involving Wanzer artillery, human perspective, hi-tech machinery, futuristic space vehicles and much more! Just like a movie without audio to help sell the visuals it just wouldn’t be the same experience. Creating sound for cinematics was a very challenging but fun adventure. In some scenes there are moments where I really wanted to grab the players attention and feed them emotion with tonal drone sounds and gritty stingers that would emphasize the moment — very similar to what a composer would do while scoring music to a scene. […]
Thanks to Chris for the link!
my name is Erick Ocampo too!! :D