Tension Studios

Currently working on cinematics for Snowblind’s new LOTR game, also heading up a new project, very hush hush.

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/

I was going to post some game play, but someone already beat me to it. Actually, a lot of people did. Here’s the first 7 minutes or so of the game. It includes some cutscenes, menu, combat, and voice systems. Sounds like this was captured off the PS2.

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.

http://www.vimeo.com/770311

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