Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/691665
SOUND DESIGN www.postmagazine.com 31 POST JUNE 2016 ear to more fully understand the space, to hear echoes appropriate to a much larger, exterior environment. It was our job to effectively replace the indoor quality cap- tured in the production tracks and make it feel like it is actually all happening outside. When you acoustically make the world correct, the experience follows." In Warcarft, which premiered June 10th, Stateman notes three main locations: the Elwynn Forest, Blackrock Pass and the Black Morass. Each one posed its own challenges, which Stateman and his team met by first creating environments based on field recordings and second, by em- bedding intricate Foley details and sound design elements into those environments. Elwynn Forest's sound is based on field recordings Stateman captured around Big Sur, CA. Those natural sounds were embellished with fantasy creature sounds that pay homage to Blizzard's World of Warcraft game, wherein a player can have a fantasy creature companion. Stateman reveals that they consciously hid sonic Easter eggs of the creature sounds in the backgrounds and off-camera environ- ments of the film. Sound effects design- er Harry Cohen recreated the creature sounds since the original in-game sounds were not of a sampling rate fit for film. But Stateman feels Cohen's creatures are a convincing imitation of the originals. "I would challenge people who are familiar with the game to tell the difference," he says. "We were on our own to explore the sound for this film and yet we were also very conscious of giving regular game players a familiar sense of these environments." For Blackrock Pass, Stateman combed through his collection of field recordings he captured in Iceland several years ago. Winds across glacial formations, over open ice fields and through rocks all served to reinforce the stark visuals of Blackrock's canyon. "The desolate winds and the lack of vegetation give us cold and lovely dark texture. In Iceland, there's really no tall vegetation. They say if you ever get lost in an Icelandic forest, all you need to do is stand up," jokes Stateman. In post, sound designer Sylvain Lasseur manipulated the wind sounds using Symbolic Sound's independent sound design workstation called the Kyma/ Pacarana, tailoring them to fit the scene's specific needs — a process similar to the work he did on The Hateful Eight. Stateman and a small team headed out to Joshua Tree National Park with a field recording kit containing a Sound Devices 788T digital recorder and high frequency omnidirectional mics such as the Sanken CO-100K. "We choose omnidirectional mi- crophones because of their lack of prox- imity effect and their wonderful frequency response," explains Stateman. At Joshua Tree, they captured heaps of rock sounds and campfires, useful later in post for the Orcs' weapons and tools. Stateman explains the secret of successful rock recording is to have the rocks interact with other rocks. And, it's best if the rocks are able to roll on other rocks, as opposed to just being dropped. "The singular sound of a rock dropping is not terribly unique nor does it describe the size and weight of the rock. So you need to work rock-on-rock and also have the event elongated by having the rock tumble and have the debris rain down onto something else. The environment reveals much more about rocks than the rocks ever can," explains Stateman. Since Joshua Tree is a giant boulder field with rocks the size of houses, there was plenty of opportunity to roll the rocks around on top of other rocks. It was also a good place to build a campfire since it's much harder to burn down a boulder field than an open grass field. In Warcraft, an Orc encampment is located in a forest clearing in the Black Morass. The Orcs possess a magic dark energy called fel, which is cast over the encampment. Here the Orcs construct a portal back to their home planet, and it's also where they stage their attack on the humans. Stateman says, sonically, it's a very mixed location, a combination of natural environmental sounds and sound design elements that Cohen created for the fel. "That is a good example of how we used organic, natural sounds as a base Warcraft features massive natural exterior environments, each of which uses sound to engage the audience.