Gun recording session for Takedown

Posted on by

YouTube Preview Image

Here’s a blog entry from Serellan about the gun recording session that we did for their game Takedown.  While the weather was not the most cooperative, we ended up with a ton of great content from two different locations.  The first location had a really great rolling thunder of a tail for each shot.  The second location had a remarkably dry sound with very little tail.  We got a good variety of perspectives thanks to the pooling of all of our resources which enabled us to have rigs all over the place.

I am the Audio Director for Takedown and it’s been really great to work with such a dedicated team.  I’ve also had some indispensable help from talented local audio professionals David Liu, Robbie Elias and Kyle Fraser.

Halo 4 videos

Posted on by

Click to go to the official website

I was fortunate enough to participate in the large team effort to ship Halo 4!  Near the end of the project everyone was chipping in and I helped out with some random sound design. This video is a collection of game captures that I would use as reference when designing the individual game assets for implementation by 343 Industries.

 

Fable: The Journey – video demos

Posted on by

Click to go to the Xbox game site

Here’s a collection of videos with some of my work. These are very low quality video taken from a developer build with debug text and other ugliness, and the mix is specifically sound effects heavy for demonstration purposes only. What these videos highlight is the “corruption” system that I built which was all driven from in-game assets. I designed the system and created all of the “corruption” sounds and implemented them in Wwise and Unreal.

Fable: The Journey – Out Now!

Posted on by

Click to go to the Xbox game site

Just a quick note that Fable: The Journey has been released!  I created the creative and technical design for the “corruption”.  All that creepy, burning, gloopy, evil?  Yep, that’s me!  I also helped with other general sound design for props, the mine-cart sequence, mixing, etc.  Videos coming soon!

Fight Camp Musical Stingers

Posted on by

Here is a collection of musical “stingers” from Fight Camp by Electrolab Games. I acted as the Audio Director, Sound Designer, Composer and Implementer for this title.  This video gathers all of the stingers that I created and plays them along with their associated image so you get an idea of what the context is. I used about a 50/50 mix of musical elements and sound design to fit the tone of the cue for what its intended message was supposed to be, very crucial for UI to tell you the right information in the right way.

Fight Camp – Gameplay captures

Posted on by

Here are some in-game video captures from Fight Camp by Electrolab Games. I acted as the Audio Director, Sound Designer, Composer and Implementer for this title.  The tone of the game is sort of a quirky, cartoonish treatment of a very slickly produced and aggressive subject. I took elements from both worlds and created an audio treatment that fits right in there. Musical SFX along with campy library materiel, with a few 8-bit sources served well for the comic/cartoony nature. In-your-face musical stingers, drawing a little from hip-hop, a little from nu-metal, and a little from who-knows-what blended with the soundtrack to give this game its musical style that’s kinda hard but kinda silly.

This first video is a straight capture from the game:

This next two videos have the music turned off to highlight the SFX:

The Lord of the Rings: War in the North – Saenathra Intro

Posted on by

war-in-the-north-lord-of-the-rings-212x300.jpg

Here is a cutscene work print with a full sound design and mix treatment.  This is a stereo fold down of a 5.0 mix. When the players enter this clearing they are supposed to feel like they have reached an oasis amidst the gloom and terror of Mirkwood. Starting off with an open and airy forest ambience helped serve to contrast against the cold, dark background that accompanies Saenathra’s POV. The creature sounds are once again a mix of processed vocalization from me and some animal library source material.

The Lord of the Rings: War in the North – Fell Beast

Posted on by

war-in-the-north-lord-of-the-rings-212x300.jpg

Here is a cutscene work print with a full sound design and mix treatment.  I incorporated in-game assets along with custom sound design to maintain continuity between the gameplay and the cinematic.  The Fell Beast vocalization was where I spent the bulk of my creative effort.  I made a large suite of specific and wild content for all of the scenes that featured this character.  I was the principle voice “actor” for the beast, layered and manipulated, and threw in some animal vocalizations for a little beastly spice.

The Lord of the Rings: War in the North – Warg Intro

Posted on by

war-in-the-north-lord-of-the-rings-212x300.jpg

Here is a cutscene work print with a full sound design and mix treatment.  This is a quick scene that serves to message to the player that their presence is no longer secret. We hear a rustling from off-screen right that anticipates the Warg’s entrance, his snort and howl, followed by his exit back into the forest on the left. The real trick was getting across his size and ferocity through a howl, which normally has an almost musical, singing tonality. Using pitch manipulation, convolution, and multiple vocalization sources I was able to craft a large and forboding howl that was more aggressive and less lonely sounding.

C’est la Mort CDs released!

Posted on by

Click to purchase

Click to go to the C'est la Mort webshop

Tension Studios client C’est la Mort has just released their debut CD along with an EP of remixes.  Tension Studios mixed and engineered the album, Empty Words Fill Lonely Spaces, plus contributed a remix to the EP (In the Soft Focus Light of I Love You) as well as mastering it.  The CD is getting great reviews, like this one.

Zombie Attack!

Posted on by

This is an excerpt from the movie Zombies of Mass Destruction (ZMD) from Typecast Films.  I was the sound designer for the gore and zombie effect sequences, which turned out to be most of the movie. This video clip has been mixed so that everything except the sound design elements have been turned down.  Every sound used for this scene was an original recording done during post production.  Adam Smith-Kipnis was the foley actor for the extensive fruit and vegetable mutilation session, as well as the voice actor for the zombie.

This is Vegas!

Posted on by

This is Vegas

This is the game that I’ve been working on for the past couple of years. I’m the Project Audio Director, so I’ve got my fingers in just about every aspect of audio, from the macro to the micro. There’s not too much info that we’ve made public other than a round of PR for a big intro we did in Las Vegas in April. Here’s a few links:

http://kotaku.com/381638/midway-gamers-day-08-this-is-vegas

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/32992.html

http://blogs.ign.com/SurrealSoftware/

Classic Remake

Posted on by

edr_xbox_hostthumb.jpg

This is one of only two cutscenes from ED:R that is a remake of scenes from the original Evil Dead II movie. Since I’m a big fan of the movies, I really wanted to do this scene justice. I tried to ride the edge of campy and creepy, much as Raimi and Campbell did. Each of the possessed items had their own voice (acted by me and others in the studio) that joined in the chorus of laughter/madness. I used plastic bottle crunches and packing tape screeches to re-create the oddly harsh ratcheting sound of the deer head’s movement. The ending boom was from a series of percussive recordings I made at Fort Wordon, a retired military gun emplacement on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. The music was an edit of some sections from an orchestral library, since at this point we didn’t have room in the budget or schedule for a real musical treatment.

Sound Design, character acting, composition, 5.1 mix encoded into Dolby PLII.

Legacy of Kain: Defiance Cut Scene

Posted on by

150_lok_defiance.gif

Here’s another cutscene work print with a full sound design and mix treatment. There is a magical “temporal” explosion happening in the background while the foreground is primarily dialog and a few SFX. 5.1 mix encoded into Dolby PLII. The vocal treatment for the possessed Yanus was a variation of the pre-verb technique; reversing the content, running the reversed content through some reverb and recording it, reverse the reverb print and playing it back in sync with the original content. This gives a great ‘ethereal’ quality to voices. But I wanted to convey more of a possession or occupied-by-evil sound so I didn’t reverse the original content when I recorded the reverb. The result is that there’s still that reversed reverb sound but also a speaking-in-tongues feel to it.

Sound Design, Foley, 5.1 mix encoded into Dolby PLII