Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 101 On Fadeouts, we had Matthew Porretta voicing all thousands of them! The Fadeouts are Wake's own nightmares hunting him in the Dark Place so it only made sense that it would be Matthew doing them too. It is a really unique approach having a single actor voice half of the game's barks, as usually it would take dozens and dozens of actors. To achieve this, we had super fun and intriguing sessions with Matthew in NYC—we played around with Meisner technique and such to reach the nightmare-like feel of the Fadeouts. He truly did an amazing job as did our principal sound designer, Tazio Schiesari, coming up with the processing chain of these barks. The variation and feel on the Fadeouts is something that I'm really proud of. RR: Big thank you to Taneli for all his insights. I would've loved to have been a fly on the wall for some of those sessions. Shifting gears to music—you mentioned Petri Alanko, whose soundtrack for the game has received a lot of praise. Can you discuss your collaboration with Petri and how you worked together to create a score that complements the game's narrative and emotional beats? RL: Petri is one of the nicest people in the world, and a great person to work with. We've been working together now for around 15 years, so we know each other's working styles and other quirks pretty well. Petri wrote a whole bunch of different music for the game from the brilliant 'Yötön Yö' to elevator music for the Dark Place. Plus of course, all the cinematics, etc. To be honest, I don't think of Petri as our composer or the music as something separate from the sound design, but Petri is a member of the audio team and the music is a part of the overall sonic experience. We never discuss minutes of music, delivery targets, or contracts. We tend to focus on what is needed emotionally and what we are trying to achieve in each scene. It's one of the advantages of Petri having such a close relationship with Remedy, he is just part of the family. Day-to-day, what this means is Petri is swapping assets and stems with the sound design team and discussing and working directly with all members of the dev team, be it sound designers, me, or our creative director Sam Lake. The whole process is organic and free-flowing. Most of Petri's composing time went into the cinematic music, and he was sharing the music stems with the sound designers who were re-shaping them to create the in-game dynamic score. About a year before launch, we brought a fantastic music team from Dynamedion—Dobrivoje Alan Wake 2's slow-paced horror works its way into the player over the course of the game. When fighting enemy Fadeouts, Alan uses bursts of light to make them vulnerable to attack.