Tension Studios

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

This is my mix of the Midway logo movie. I was asked to create an alternate ending for the HD version of the logo. While I was doing that, I was so annoyed by the over-used distorted swooshes that seem to be used for every game publisher logo I decided to remix the whole thing. I wanted to use a wider frequency range so as the logo flies in there’s a low filter sweep bass element and the movement of the individual graphic elements are highlighted by processed knife shwings and whooshes. The ‘Midway’ shake of the logo has some elements in it that allude to some of their more popular titles, but it’s so short it’s hard to pick them out. Regardless, it has an interesting detail that I like.

Sound Design, 5.1 mix encoded into Dolby PLII

This is a more subtle mix and sound design example. The graveyard night ambiance is a composite of some field recordings that I did in Eastern Washington. One of the layers is significantly pitched down and the frogs take on a nightmare cow kinda feel.  The music is typical of my eerie mood compositions, with the obligatory church bell to connote ‘graveyard’.

Sound design, composition, 5.1 mix encoded into Dolby PLII

This is one of the cutscenes I did for Crystal Dynamics on contract. I did all of these scenes using Sony Vegas so I could transfer them back to the developer and they could render out the scenes for each localized language by replacing the dialog track. This also allowed me to work to rough renders while animators could continue to make tweaks to the scenes and the developers could make any timing adjustments in-house. There were a number of visual FX elements that were not able to be rendered for these work prints so I had to be a bit more imaginative in designing my sounds. This turned out to be rather inspirational for the FX artists and they were creating the visuals to my sounds instead of the other way around.

They provided the raw dialog plus any assets that needed to be the same as the in-game sounds (Spirit Forge background, core Reaver elements). Note the classic ‘pre-verb’ treatment I used on Ariel’s voice to create an ethereal but comforting feel.

Sound design, 5.1 mix encoded into Dolby PLII