Post Magazine

May 2010

Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/10459

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 34 of 47

New media is going mainstream as audio houses find themselves scoring and creating sound design for increasing num- bers of Web commercials, games of every type, cinema pre-features and social networking apps. While these projects pose new challenges they also share every client’s desire for high quality and cutting-edge creative. SOMATONE Nick Thomas and Kane Minkus, co-founders of Emeryville, CA’s SomaTone Interactive Audio (www.somatone.com), came out of film and radio production and pop music, but today 90 percent of their work is soundtrack design for games and interactive Web campaigns.Their company, which is headquartered in Emeryville, CA, with offices in Los Angeles,Vancouver and Munich, has more than 600 game titles to its credit, including Konami’s Karaoke Revolution fran- chise, Big Fish Games’ Mystery Case Files series, PlayFirst’s Diner Dash series and Ubisoft’s Assassins Creed II. The “old-school” audio model was “more equipment and studio intensive,” Thomas reports. By contrast,“new media audio companies tend to be much more streamlined. Our composing and sound design is a result of purely digital platforms — no big traditional consoles, few mics. Sure, we have speakers and monitors; there’s plenty of equipment everywhere, but the gear we use has a smaller footprint and most of the time we work remotely from our clients. Probably two percent of our clients worldwide ever visit our studios. “Traditional media is much more resource intensive,” he muses.“You have to accommodate clients’ onsite input. But game audio and interactive Web audio is primarily done through virtual private networks or via FTP access.That is very convenient, and clients have the advantage of shopping the global marketplace for audio resources.” Thomas notes that SomaTone’s game clients don’t just look to the studio for creative services, but for technical leadership as well.“We’re able to control the process more than an audio provider traditionally does.We’re not just filling re- quests for 10 minutes of music or hundreds of sound effects, but working closely with the producers of the games and helping to define the needs of the soundtrack.We suggest how the audio should be designed and integrated for the optimal immersive game experience. New media isn’t a linear experience like broadcast or film.You don’t bake in the audio in the final mix as you do with film or broadcast media.” Additional opportunities come from the variables that need to be antici- pated in game play.“You’ve got to write a great score, but you also have to an- ticipate how to move from an ambient, tension-building cue to action in a non- linear way,” he explains.“It’s more like a puzzle and can be very complex to de- sign.Think of all the variables at play in any given situation and how you have to compose so you can seamlessly transition from different emotional states.” Thomas has found it liberating to work with middle-ware audio engines such as FMod and WWISE.“As a composer and sound designer,we work with Logic or Pro Tools then plug the assets into the audio engine. It’s the in-between step, the layer between composing and programming that links all the variables to the assets you’ve created.The more expertise we utilize with the audio engines, the more we are able to design with an idea of how the components will be in- tegrated.We’re not just composers or sound designers anymore; we’re closer to programmers and engineers than we ever were in the past.” COUPE In Boulder,CO,Coupe Studios Music & Sound Design (www.coupestudios.com) creatively approaches new media projects much as it does broadcast and long- and short-form films. But the technical aspects can be quite different. “With interactive pieces, the actual mix often takes place on the fly as the user interacts with the project,” says producer Eric Singer.“The user is creating the mix at the time of interaction, so it takes more planning to anticipate every potential combination of sounds.” For an online game, for example, “we start with a QuickTime movie of someone playing the game with the mouse onscreen, clicking, interacting. We score and create the sound design to that — it’s almost identical to how we approach a film.Then we get approvals, rip apart the mixes and SomaTone uses its streamlined studios to create soundtracks for videogames, such as Konami’s Karaoke Revolution. Unless delivery specs call for a specific level, Coupe Studios generally delivers files at -1dB as opposed to -10dB for TV. Although file formats also lack stan- dards, most developers want MP3 files to save on size.That’s an advance over the company’s first game projects in the late 1980s, which required 8-bit or smaller files.“Remembering those days actually makes us grateful for compres- sion formats like MP3,” reports Kaufman.“At least now something resembling the full audio spectrum is represented.As the technology gets better the possi- bilities for audio grow exponentially.” Coupe Studios works with the client or agency to optimize mixes to arrive at a “happy compromise” when playback platforms vary.“We want to rattle the cages of people with 5.1 systems and not distort things on a laptop,” says Kaufman. When Coupe mixed a song for the latest edition of Guitar Hero, it required that each instrumental and vocal track be individually mastered and blended to- gether to replicate the mix of the mastered song off the album.“With Pro Tools we used a chain of mastering plug-ins on every track rather than on a summing buss,” Kaufman explains. “After finding volume and compression levels for the tracks that compared to the original song mix, the tracks were bounced individ- ually for the client.This way, when the programmer took the song apart for the purpose of the game, it would always play as the album-quality mix when put back together again.” Singer sees Facebook as one of the biggest growth areas in new media. Coke Zero’s “Facial Profiler” Facebook app takes the position that Coke Zero is a lot like Coke, so maybe there’s someone out there who’s a lot like you. It invites Facebook users to upload photos of themselves, then scans the images to find people who look alike. Coupe Studios did extensive sound design for the app “creating a whole world of sound from scratch, starting with a futuristic, evolv- ing industrial ambiance,” he says.“We built individual events to be layered above that by the programmers: rollover effects, clicks, scanning sounds and other audio that helped us construct this virtual world.” www.postmagazine.com May 2010 • Post 33 provide the individual sound elements for each event.” Senior engineer Ed Kaufman points out that “each component has to have a finished, mastered sound to work together to create a glossy mix.There’s not much difference be- tween a good game and an animated movie these days except the game player gets to push the characters around.” Coupe Studios taps its Digidesign Pro Tools|HD systems for almost all of its work and deploys a combination of sound effects libraries and Foley for sound design.“We tend to record more Foley for games,” says Singer.“You don’t have to be as literal with sounds as in a film, so we can think outside the box, stacking and warping sounds — it’s fun!”

Articles in this issue

Links on this page

Archives of this issue

view archives of Post Magazine - May 2010