Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1436283
72 I m ps e . o rg walking through stuff. That was a whole new thing, and The Last of Us Part II is a whole new level. RK: I think Foley is the connection of the character to the world and the player. It gives you information from a gameplay standpoint. Am I being loud or quiet? I think that's what it does for games in particular, especially stealth games like The Last of Us. In terms of systems, we've been afforded more memory and processing to make it more detailed. I worked on all the Foley on Uncharted 4, and influenced the system all the way through The Last of Us Part II. The goal for us is to have like a mini-Foley team that is scoring your picture live. We want to build the system out to where it's robust enough to no matter what blend of animation is happening at any moment, there's the correct appropriate sound that goes with it. That's always been the goal, and a lot of that goes back to working with those Foley artists. We work with people who are very familiar with linear, and we've gotten the opportunity to work with the same ladies over at formerly Paramount, now Formosa Group, Dawn Lunsford and Alicia Stevenson and their engineer David Jobe. They're extremely patient because they have to do all those motions on every single surface in the game. That surface list has only grown and gotten more complicated over the years. EM: Outside of the Foley in these games, how often do you all go out and record sounds yourselves? PK: As much as possible. RK: We are recording sometimes up until the last day before we ship. I remember on Uncharted 4, grabbing Nerf guns from people's offices and recording them on my desk in my office to do the little pop ball gun. That was days before we shipped the game. We are constantly recording in our offices. Derrick Espino was a prolific recordist and would record stuff all the time. All the melee that is in Uncharted 3 and in The Last of Us, he custom recorded all of that stuff. We did big vehicle records for Uncharted 4 and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. Every sound designer that comes into our studio, we try to hire people who are interested in recording because ultimately, using libraries is fine; it's necessary. But if you can add a layer of specificity to the game Drake and Sam ride together in Uncharted 4: A Thief's End.