Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
158 M PS E . O R G "For the supernatural sequences, we decided to not only do them in stereo, but also to gently pan dialogue with character screen position, giving it a bit more of an immediate sense of realism..." expanded, I ended up absorbing all the film clips as things went along at a slower pace than initially anticipated. I think it ended up taking about half a year. Chris: You worked for six months? Kevin: Pretty much, though not nonstop every day. There would sometimes be downtime between shot batches, a bit of "hurry up and wait." I'd imagine post was complicated by the way they shot all the footage. The script was over 400 pages long, and the final cut of footage in the game runs about 10 hours long, so it was a lot of material by volume. The shoot itself, which happened before I came on, took them months, in part due to COVID. The safety concerns likely contributed to their having only essential on-screen cast present on any given day, so wild lines for characters behind the camera were usually recorded on different days in different locations, so we often had to go on treasure hunts to find the files. Sometimes I'd collaborate with the picture editor to hunt down wild lines that we knew we had somewhere, but weren't showing up when we needed them. We largely moved linearly through the fictional timeline as we edited, which made the narrative developments easier to follow for me as an editor, but that meant committing to some bigger style choices without knowing all the consequences those decisions would have down the line. I didn't have a full overview of all the footage to test out ideas on available to me at the outset, so I basically decided on some ground rules for the game's audio style and hoped I wouldn't screw myself later on in the project. We knew going in, there were about a dozen period audio mediums to recreate, and then the supernatural sequences. I drafted some early filter presets for some of the main types of sound I knew we'd need ahead of time, using production dialogue from other shows I'd worked on as sample input, but until I had the actual footage, there was no way of truly predicting the outcome. So we started working from the beginning of the story, in 1968, then 1970, and finally 1999, when the last archival footage is set. So, some of the 1968 filters influenced the sound of the 1970 filters, because I wanted the player to be able to distinguish eras and media through the different feel and color of dialogue. Since the player explores the footage in a meandering order—figuring out chronology is part of the game's puzzle—I wanted to try to make things as clear as possible by having different eras and audio formats sound discernibly different from one another. One challenge was making the production audio for Ambrosio, a 1968 sound stage picture, sound texturally different enough from Minsky, a 1970's film shot on location. So I based the EQ for Ambrosio on the classic Academy curve, and the EQ for Minsky on the X Curve, like they were using Dolby's Type A noise reduction, so it has a slightly fuller frequency range. In reality, this is a bit of an anachronistic cheat, since A Clockwork Orange was the first film to use Dolby Type A, and that released in 1971, but literal realism often has little to do with believability, so I felt it was the right choice to make. Minsky is very much a "seventies movie," so why not make it sound like one. For the supernatural sequences, we decided to not only do them in stereo, but also to gently pan dialogue with character screen position, giving it a bit more of an immediate sense of realism, as if the worlds opened up and become more present than the mono archive footage scenes. I used a little bit of binaural plugin processing here and there, but I didn't want to get too eerie or uncanny with it, where it would become distracting, so it was mostly used on Foley when characters would walk past the camera or approach from behind. The dialogue itself was placed with conventional stereo L/R panning. We were happy with this decision, but the third and final film, Two of Everything, has a supernatural sequence portraying a film script table read, with about half a dozen characters seated in different spots throughout the frame, and I only received a mono audio track to work