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 89 to the game. Winning both the MPSE and BAFTA, a couple of the biggest awards out there for audio, has been amazing. RR: Since your team won for dialogue, that seems like the perfect place to dig in. Can you delve into the specifics of your dialogue pipeline for Alan Wake 2? What unique challenges did you face, and how did you overcome them? RL: Dialogue is always the king for us, so a lot of thought has gone into how to get the best results. Because of our facial animation capture system, much of our main dialogue is recorded in our VO studio in Finland. Over the last 12 years, we've developed an in-house audio pipeline that works with our animation system to ensure all our takes remain in sync with the animation data. Remedy games always have complex narrative requirements, usually in the form of multiple different 'voice types' for the characters. For instance, Alan has his Narration Voice, Conversation Voice, To-Self Voice, and Internal Monologue Voice. To understand the story, it's important that the player knows which voice is which. Therefore, everything from the directing, mic choice, and dialogue post-processing to the placement of the dialogue in the stereo field needs to match up. Being the MPSE Award winner and senior dialogue designer, I thought it was only fair to pose the question to Taneli Suoranta too, and he went into the details below: Taneli Suoranta: I wanted to have a real film-like and dynamic feel to the dialogue to emphasize the narrative and blend in together all the different media that we had in the game (gameplay, cinematics, live action, and even a musical). As a Remedy game, the number one challenge was the quantity of dialogue. Our games are really story- and narrative-driven, so tracking all the material was the essence of it all. Gladly, we have our own Northlight Team providing us tools for this, so every revised script and edited dialogue got into the game nicely and neatly. We also had our own Reaper scripts managing the flow of mixing and mastering the dialogue. I'm super grateful for the whole team with our other senior dialogue designer Arthur Tisseront and external partners Manik Möllers and Mikael Lindblad Ehnborg for handling all of this with me. Recording-wise, we had three different setups really: our own in-house DI-facial system, external HMC-head mount camera, and audio-driven facials. The DI-facial system requires the actors to keep their heads completely still. Hence, we had them lean their head onto a tennis ball to stay in place and stare forward the whole time while performing complicated scenes— quite a curveball! They say that the body is the instrument of the actor, so you really must find unique ways to get into the scene and character. Also, as we did all the actors in separate sessions, preparing audio references and cues were important. Most unique of all of this was of course, the main character Alan Wake, who was first voice acted by the brilliant Matthew Porretta and then "face dubbed" by the magnificent Ilkka Villi. Same thing with Casey—he was voiced by the beloved late James McCaffrey and face dubbed by our own Sam Lake. In live action, these were the other way around with Ilkka doing the performance and then ADRing with Matthew and so on. Working with such brilliant actors and directors and unique process just really added Taneli Suoranta, senior dialogue designer, accepting the Golden Reel Award for Alan Wake 2.