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 97 culling abruptly or too few sounds to make the world sound good. In the end, we dropped the whole systemic approach—it was too much of a compromise on quality and ended up hand-crafting each location, adding the spots to the world by hand. This gave us control to tune the placement, culling, attenuation, and occlusion. It also meant that we had more control over the voice count for each area which helped a lot with the optimization. Looking back now with hindsight, I'm glad we went the manual route because the quality was better and it probably saved us time in the long run. Once we got the outdoors working, we started on the indoor and transition points. This was easier as there was a baseline to work with. The door transitions are complex, they handle location ambience reverbs, gun tails, and rain transitions. With the rain, we fold down the rain bed to a mono source point and play if from the door opening. We keep all the transitions slow and smooth so nothing 'sonically' jumps out and breaks immersion. There are a whole host of other tricks we used, enough for a whole article on its own. But one of my favorites is we count trees in the vicinity of the player and increase wind and rain in the height channels, the more trees there are. It's subtle but is a really nice touch because it adds to the feeling of space and depth of the world. One thing I'd like to add is that the rain system for both the Dark Place and Washington State are the same but the assets are different. In keeping with the two locations' contrast and duality, it made sense to extend this to the rain, too. Thomas Holmes and Tazio Schiesari created two sets of assets for Washington State and the Dark Place, respectively. RR: Could you tell us more about Washington State and the Dark Place? How did you approach the sound design for these two distinct worlds? RL: The story of Alan Wake 2 revolves around a series of interconnected, mirrored, paralleled, or contrasting themes. Examples include darkness and light, Saga The Dark Place takes the form of a twisted, otherworldly version of New York City.