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