Sound Design for Film, Games and Interactive Media
In the same way I did with the previous specials, you have the opportunity to ask your own questions to the featured sound designers, this time Charles Deenen. There are several ways to do that:
THE FUTURE OF SOUND DESIGN IN VIDEO GAMES, Part 1
The following article contains excerpts from the “Future of Sound Design” lectures at GDC, VFS and Dutch Film Festival originally presented in 2006. Please note that certain expressions are personal opinions, and cannot be read as “fact”.
In our endless passion to make games have a similar, or exceeding sound-scape experience in comparison to other media, we constantly try to find new ways and techniques to obtain this. Some people ask “why are we comparing ourselves to film sound design, we’re very different”. Other say “Film sound experiences are the ultimate goal”. I say both are right. But to really figure out what the future may hold, we have to first learn from the past to enable measurement of missing objectives and goals.
To answer, we have to being by asking ourselves some questions:
The Past – Evolution in Numbers
Technical hinderances, ever since the X360 and PS3, have been much less of a hurdle for a sound designer to create engaging soundscapes. Lets look at the history, based on the most popular game machine/console during each period.
As you can see in Fig 1 & 2, the amount of sound-data currently storable on the console is so much, that in comparison the old consoles barely show up on the graphs. Memory isn’t really a technological barrier anymore.
George Spanos has published a nice talk he had with Vance Dylan, sound designer with work on titles such as Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, and Sonic Chronicles. Vance talks about specific games, his career and how he creates sound. Let’s read:
Let’s start off with the ubiquitous question: when did you decide to pursue a career in sound?
Vance Dylan: I was inspired by my Uncle Eddie who was a singer/songwriter who would often open for Bill Haley and the Comets way back in the day. My dad was also a great closet musician who never did pursue his dream but damn he was a sweet guitar player.I tried a few things, became a decent drummer, tried to write songs but sucked at it but the whole time I was very interested in hooking up gear and messing around with recording things. I think my first recording was that of my sister playing her recorder back in he 70’s using a Candle cassette recorder.
With the success of the first Mass Effect, where there any sound implementation changes that were necessary for Mass Effect 2?
Vance Dylan: There were massive changes in audio from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2. We used the (Creative Labs’) Isact audio engine on the first one which limited what we could do, we are now using Wwise which in my opinion is the best audio engine on the market today. We also had a big shift in our team as we brought in Rob Blake as the audio lead and added more team members to handle the load. I think we had 10 guys working on ME2 at one point. As far as implementation, it was a whole new ball game using Wwise. For example in ME2, I was responsible for all the vehicles in game and in cutscenes and all that and we were able to do stuff like making sound more intimidating if you were more paragon. The idea being if you were more renegade then you wouldn’t be as scared or the sound wouldn’t be as scary to you. Things like that took only a few minutes to set up using Wwise where before it just wasn’t possible at all.
Some days ago I read this great article on Gamasutra created by my friend Damian Kastbauer, and I just realized that I didn’t talk about it on the blog, so if you haven’t read it yet, you can do it now:
It’s a great time in game audio these days. As we move forward in the current console generation, several emerging examples of best practices in audio implementation have been exposed through articles, demonstrations, and video examples.
Even though in some ways it feels like the race towards next gen has just begun, some of the forward-thinking frontrunners in the burgeoning field of Technical Sound Design have been establishing innovative techniques and pulling off inspirational audio since the starting gun was fired over four years ago with the release of the Xbox 360.
It’s a good feeling to know that there are people out there doing the deep thinking in order to bring you some of the richest audio experiences in games available today. In some ways, everyone working in game audio is trying to solve a lot of the same problems.
Whether you’re implementing a dynamic mixing system, interactive music, or a living, breathing ambient system, the chances are good that your colleagues are slaving away trying to solve similar problems to support their own titles.
In trying to unravel the mystery of what makes things tick, I’ll be taking a deeper look at our current generation of game sound and singling out several pioneers and outspoken individuals who are leaving a trail of interactive sonic goodness (and publicly available information) in their wake. Stick around for the harrowing saga of the technical sound designer in today’s multi-platform maelstrom.
New Avatar Sound Profile, this time by SoundWorks Collection, with great information about the sound of the film, given by Chris Boyes from Skywalker Sound.
The groundbreaking technical and directorial abilities of Director James Cameron can be experienced in his breathtaking visual world of Pandora in “Avatar”. This never before seen world is filled with landscapes, creatures, and civilizations that have also never been heard before by audiences.
Bringing to life the sounds of Pandora include the talent of Skywalker Sound’s Supervising Sound Editor, Sound Re-recording Mixer, and Sound Designer Chris Boyes in this SoundWorks Collection sound for film.
Designing Sound: Hi Charles, first of all, would be great to have an introduction about your career. How did you start, how you grow up in the sound world, and so on…
Charles Deenen: Thanks for the invite! We’ll have a fun month together with (hopefully) lots of usable info.
I’ve been called an old fella by some young folks in the industry, so am getting up there in age. I grew up in the netherlands and around 1983, attempted to start doing audio on a computer. That was the era of Commodore PET, so I tried to get tolerable sound out of a single-beep CBM-PET, and oh my, that didn’t go so well, LOL. Soon after acquiring a C64, I started to make music/graphic demos, through which I met Jeroen Tel. We wanted to make our own music, and wrote a music-driver for the Commodore 64. Well, this led to us having the “odd” idea that maybe we could make money doing this. You know, maybe just enough to pay for some gum and floppy-disks. There we travelled as young teenagers, all dressed up, to the european computer show in London where Hewson gave us our first paid gig. Apparently they liked what we did, and this led to many more jobs from a wide range of companies. Initially, I mainly provided the sound-effects for the titles which we did, but soon had to delve into doing music. Well, I knew nothing about music. I knew that a C major sounded OK after a D minor, that’s about it, LOL. However, funny enough the first music pieced I did wasn’t bad, and started doing more and more.
Early appreciation of cars
In the late 80‘s our company “Maniacs of Noise” had to begin sub-contracting, and at its peak had 5 people making musical noise at once. Considering those early computer-game years, that was huge. During those time, computer games were not nearly as main-stream as now. Zzap 64 was about the only magazine dedicated to gaming, and a game development team was 3-4 people. We provided music and/or sfx for over a hundred games on Commodore 64, 128, Amiga, Atari ST and Spectrum.
In 1990, one of the projects we did was “Dragon’s War” by Interplay which I’d taken on. They liked what I did, and asked me to move to the USA. Only 20 years old, I said “sure, why not”. After all Visa related items were completed I moved to Irvine, CA in the middle of 1991 where I started as Audio Director for Virgin Games and Interplay Productions. After doing McKids for Virgin on the NES, I moved solely to Interplay where I stayed for the next 10 years. Startrek, Baldur’s Gate, Ice-Wind Dale, Descent and others were some of the franchises I worked on while employed there. After a short stint at Shiny where I worked on the Matrix game, I went freelance to work on feature films. Thanks for Soundstorm, who gave me a chance on “Superman”, “Fast and Furious” and “2 Fast 2 Furious” were some of the first ones I worked on. This is were I fell in love with cars and emotionally engaging sound design.
Electronic Arts was in the process to re-boot their Need for Speed franchise a bit with NFS Underground. During this, I received a call from a very nice gentlemen at EA who asked if I’d be interested to move to canada to work on this. My first reaction was “canada… oh man… that’s too cold… thanks, but no”. Through the generosity of EA, my wife and I visited Vancouver, BC and actually really liked it, so we ended up moving there. We had the fortunate luck to find a house which allowed me to build a nice studio from which I do a fair bit of (non game) projects as well.
Since 2001, doing sound for Feature film trailers has been a side-job on weekends. Daredevil was my first one, and since then have worked on more than 60 of them including some recent ones like “Clash of the Titans” and “Salt”.
They are my learning cases. How to do great sound-design under an extreme tight deadline has you reaching for the most odd solutions, which in turn help with the production of video-game sound design.
DS: You’re creating sounds since the era of the Commodore and Atari ST… What do you think about the evolution of the game audio industry? What could be the next step?
CD: We’ve now reached a level of sound reproduction similar to film sound. The next era will not be about “more voices” and “more dsp”, it’ll be about creating emotionally engaging and believable soundscapes. 95% of games still break the believability barrier within the first few minutes, wether it’s through actor performances, character placement or odd pauses and gaps. There are many ways to take a player out of the experience, and that’s still our biggest issue today. Added technology will help, and make it easier again, but until we overcome this believability gap, all the technology in the world is not going to do it for us.
Cool featurette on the sound design of “Drag Me to Hell” with comments of re-recording mixers Marti Humphrey and Chris Jacobson and co-sound supervisor Jussi Tegelman.
(Thanks to Gabriel for the link)
Dark Void is a new sci-fi adventure game from CAPCOM for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. The story is about a cargo pilot called William Augustus Grey who crashes into the Bermuda Triangle and is teleported to a parallel universe. With the help of other survivor humans and Nikola Tesla, Willian have to go back to the earth, but first fighting with all kind of creatures on the Void.
Here is an interview I had with Tom Smurdon, Audio director of Dark Void.
Designing Sound: Hi Tom, please give us an introduction of your career and how was your start with sound design.
Tom Smurdon: Hi! When I was younger I learned to play guitar, but I was always playing more with the effects. I loved plugging pedals into pedals and more pedals to see what kind of noises I could make. Then I got a 4-track and knew that’s what I wanted to do. I ended up going to Full Sail to become a recording engineer. I interned and then became a second engineer at Bad Animals in Seattle. This was in the early 90’s and I got to work with some great bands Soundgarden, Deftones, Staind, Pigeonhed, Presidents of the USA, and the Foo Fighters. I also worked with some great producers and engineers. There is a lot of downtime when you assist on a record and during mixing the bands get so bored.
Luckily right around this time the playstation came out. If I wasn’t in the studio I was home glued to that thing. All the bands had them too. The music industry was changing and I bought my first daw, PARIS. I started freelancing more and doing some sound design work then. I ended up working for an online education company as their audio guy. I would edit dialog all day and sound design the flash animations that went with the lectures.
DS: How did you get involved with the games industry? and how with Dark Void?
TS: My wife was still working at Bad Animals and she would record voice talent for videogames. She was working on a game called Voodoo Vince for the Xbox. One of the guys asked her if she knew of any sound designers that worked freelance and bam, I got my first videogame! I still have no idea how I talked my way into that job.
After that game, I got a job working for Omni Audio. I worked on sooo many games with those guys over 6 years. I have sounds in over 22 shipped titles. We did all of the Guild Wars games; I think I am personally responsible for over 300 different sets of monster sounds in that series alone. Worked on Halo 2, the Sims, Vanguard, Rise of Legends and on and on. Omni is a great group and they will do entire games or just get pulled in at the last minute for emergency sounds when teams run out of time.
Airtight Games was looking for an audio team and they hired Omni. I became the audio lead on Dark Void and then when the project ended, I stayed on as Airtight’s audio director.
February will be a great month for Designing Sound. We’ll have a lot of great stuff, starting with this month’s featured sound designer: Charles Deenen.
Bio
In a career that has spanned more than twenty years, Charles has leant his hand to over 200 games, numerous films, and dozens of film trailers.
In the 80’s, Charles and a partner founded the world’s first company dedicated to producing audio for computers. Charles’ work was eventually noticed by Interplay Entertainment, he moved from the Netherlands to work on Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, and Star Trek game franchises, among others.
In 2000, Charles took a break from the gaming industry to pursue sound design for films. During that time, he worked on two Fast and Furious films , among others. This work translated into a passion for fast cars, loud sound, and the ultimate pursuit of emotionally-engaging audio. Alongside long-format sound design, Charles continues to contribute to Hollywood’s trailer advertising arm.
Charles returned to game audio on the Matrix franchise for Shiny Entertainment in 2002. This led to a full time position in the role of Senior Audio Director at Electronic Arts Vancouver. Here, he managed to combine his fascination for fast cars with his history in games on the Need for Speed series.
Currently living in Port Moody, BC with his lovely wife Ana, he enjoys spending his spare-time withpPhotography, music remixing and watching movies.
Some Works
Full Credits
Charles Deenen on IMDb
Charles Deenen on Twitter
Charles Deenen Website
Photography hobbypage
The last issue of MPEG Magazine has an interesting article about the sound design of “The Book of Eli” with sound editors/sound designers Steven D. Williams, MPSE, and Eric Norris, MPSE. Let’s read:
After tackling survival in urban America in Menace II Society, Dead Presidents and American Pimp, directing team the Hughes brothers—Albert and Allen—have turned their attention to the end of the world.
In their latest, The Book of Eli, due mid-January from Warner Bros., the world as we know it has ended. In this post-apocalyptic landscape, it’s everyone for himself and no-holds-barred in the struggle for survival. Eli (Denzel Washington) fights his way across America bearing a precious book that holds the secrets for the survival of mankind.
Just what does the end of the world sound like? That’s the question that faced supervising sound editors/sound designers Steven D. Williams, MPSE, and Eric Norris, MPSE, as they approached this daunting film. “When I read the script, I saw very exciting sound opportunities,” says Williams. “Everything that ends up on the screen sonically has to fit.” The audio post was done at Universal Studios Sound.
The movie was shot in the desolate desert outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. “There are a lot of wide-open spaces,” explains Norris. “It has an Old West feel to it. A lot of life was damaged and destroyed in this apocalyptic event, so we had to build that into the sound.”
Williams had the benefit of having worked with the Hughes brothers for 17 years, since Menace II Society. He notes that their last movie, From Hell—about Jack the Ripper in 1800s London—also required the creation of another kind of world. “But for The Book of Eli, surviving the environment is a big part of the story,” he says. “Water and all other resources are scarce. Our sound had to make that harsh, unfriendly world more believable.”
The directors put a big emphasis on sound, according to Williams. “They think about it before they start shooting,” he says. “Before they shoot, they let us know what the movie is about; they send us movies to listen to and talk about what they’re thinking. We also had the opportunity to go to the set and get a sense of what they were trying to achieve.”
Williams and Norris also note that their efforts were supported by a strong team, including editor Cindy Mollo, A.C.E.; supervising Foley artist Gary Hecker; and re-recording mixers Chris Jenkins and Frank A. Montaño.
Though a post-apocalyptic world can be quiet, there are gun battles aplenty in The Book of Eli, and that was one of the more challenging aspects of the sound editing/design work. Norris notes that the Hughes brothers mentioned two films—director Michael Mann’s Heat in 1995 and the 2005 Australian film by John Hillcoat, The Proposition—in terms of how they wanted the guns to sound. The opening gun battle in the latter, says Norris, was quite effective. “You don’t hear the guns at all—just the impact, the ricochet and the debris,” he says. “It gave you a visceral feeling.” This was crucial to the movie, in which Eli gets directional cues for where to shoot based upon where he hears the gunshots.
The sound editors also got a good feel for what the directors wanted from the gun battles in Heat. “The brothers aren’t into big Hollywood-sounding guns,” says Norris. “They are more into realistic-sounding guns. Having said that, they wanted it nice and big, but not over-the-top.” Williams agrees. “They’re into realism,” he adds. “Michael Mann [in Heat] is known for using a lot of the production sound captured on set. It has a visceral feel for guns. We wanted to make sure we weren’t Hollywood-izing our guns.”
Easier said than done. One thing they learned right away was how profoundly the environment in which the guns were recorded added to the overall sound. It turns out that most firing ranges are located in canyons, giving a distinctive sound that didn’t match the film’s location. “We didn’t want the canyon tail off the guns,” explains Norris. “The big battle happens at a house in the middle of a desert with wide open spaces.” The team ended up bringing on re-recording mixer John Fasal, who is well known for his wealth of knowledge, for location recording.
They spent several trips doing test shoots, bringing the sounds back to Norris’ cutting room and comparing them to get exactly what they wanted. “Finding the ideal location is a science project,” says Williams. “You have to go out there physically and once you get there, you have to really spend time going into different areas in that location. You have to do that before you bring the whole team out there.” The two winning locations ended up being the Burbank Police firing range and the Ojai Valley Gun Club.
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