Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1436283
m ot ion p ictu re s o u n d e d i to r s I 71 to do this so badly because he was such an audiophile and AV-phile on this, that when we had a review, the first review that AVS forum gave the sound a 10, he cried, because those were his people. I will never forget that. We knew we were onto something which had not been done as much in games before, and it was a different experience. RK: I think something unique to The Last of Us that allowed for it to go even further than Uncharted was the fact that the music was so minimalistic throughout. That is rare in games still to this day. There's almost always wall-to-wall music in games—that's just the expectation. Getting a project like The Last of Us where you don't have wall-to- wall music, you have a lot of play room to experiment with how wide of dynamic range the player can tolerate. It turns out, pretty wide, which is cool. As Phil pointed out, I think having the options in the menu is critical as well because ultimately, we want the players to be able to hear everything the way they need to hear it for the story. Giving them those options, if they don't have an expensive sound system to play back on at max volume, they can tune it to where they're still experiencing the story in a way that is meaningful. PK: It caused an uneasiness for the player, too. I saw so many player comments saying, "is that a frog or a clicker? I don't know ... I'm going to die!" RK: Yeah, dynamic range gets you to lean in, which you want from a player, because it means they're really in it, they're immersed. When people are back on their couch and they're kind of whatever, and they're looking at their phone, in a way you're failing. When there is that quiet moment and you hear a frog, and you're not quite sure what you're hearing, that's a win for us. That's engaging them into the story and into the fiction of the world. BS: That's an evolutionary thing. We are designed to try to parse out what's in our environment. If you're being bombarded with sound, there's no opportunity to do that at all. PK: We knew we were onto something with this game at E3, and had the behind-closed-door demo with the hotel sequence. Naughty Dog allowed me to go and be behind closed doors when these happened. I would watch the reviewers and the press sit there and they literally would lean forward in their seat to try and experience it. That's how we knew we were really onto something. That was kind of the moment. It was a really, really good moment. EM: That's really interesting. I want to talk more about your philosophy and approach to micro Foley. Naughty Dog's Foley work has always been superb and immaculately detailed. The weight and specificity always stands out for every character. What goes into the Foley in games at Naughty Dog? How do you bring that to life? PK: Detail, detail, detail. RK: And granularity, honestly. BS: A lot of it comes from the fact that the animations became more sophisticated, and the way that they were created became more sophisticated. There didn't used to be many contiguous sequences that you could walk Foley to and put them in the game. You can do that with some cut scenes or some IGCs, but the in-game Foley is definitely a very granular approach. When we first started working on Uncharted 1, looking at the way that they were doing the animations, as the sound people we want to cover everything. We kind of went for it. As far as the feet were concerned, we started having Foley artists do steps heel to toe because we change the interval between those depending on the gait, whether they were walking, running, sprinting, etc. And all kinds of other moves like scuffs, turns, slides, drags, and taps—a lot of that came from the animations. They threw all that stuff in there, it looked great, and so it needed to sound great. It drove the Foley artists crazy because they weren't used to doing that, and they had to do that for every surface. So they created multiple samples of all that stuff. It's the hands too, because you could interact with things, so hand pats, hand slides, body rolls, and body falls on every surface. For the body falls, they started to ragdoll those. So instead of a single thing, there'd be a body component. Then there would be pieces for the arms and feet as they would fall later. This is old hat now for everybody, but back then, that's how we approached it. These animations, depending on what the player's doing, the game creates them, blends them, and composes our sounds on the fly. So it had to be completely granular. PK: Yeah, that was definitely the aesthetic we built upon over the years. We added a lot more things in The Last of Us where it's not just the Foley of the character, but the Foley of what they're on and how they're on it. There's weight and depth and movement on things that didn't just stop with a footstep. There was a little dust trail or a rattle of a staircase—that always engaged the world on a much deeper level. In Uncharted 4, we even added foliage systems, so you're actually