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 147 pursuing this field had it not been for his email. In terms of mentorship, again, there are so many I could name here. Brad, Steve, Jon, Shane, and Jen from VFS for putting up with me at Vancouver Film School and teaching me almost everything I know. Beau Jimenez from Sony and Pat Biason from BioWare are my creature teachers. When I was first getting into the swing of things with BioWare, Pat gave me a ton of great exercises to do to better understand how to develop detailed creature sounds without them getting into "animal sandwich" territory. Beau is a monster when it comes to sound design, and he'd walk me through his sessions for the God of War Ragnarök creatures and I was always so in awe of what he was creating. Caleb and Chris at Brass Lion not only taught me a ton about music editing and modular synthesis, but also gave me the opportunity to learn about leadership in sound design and how to be a better professional in the industry. Lastly, I can't go without mentioning my partner, Ron. While he is primarily on the music side, his dedication to making new systems that level up the audio presentation, and really falling in love with every part of the process is such a huge inspiration to me. Can you describe your typical workflow when starting a new game project? How do you go about creating the initial sound design concepts? PH: I'll stick to the creature feature for this answer, since that's what I tend to love doing the most. The first thing I do after gathering all my videos, art references, and information is pretty much throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I'll rummage through the library, throw things through Melda's Morph plug-in, and go wild on processing and effects to see what kinds of things start to sound close to how I want the creature to end up. Once I have a general idea down, I'll clear out the unused source and start building up the layers. I find with creatures, you never really know what source will work for their vocalizations, so I try my best to not focus on the recorded source but rather the tone, texture, and emotion that I hear. I try to have my Reaper sessions organized by subprojects, and for creature vocals, I'll have parent tracks per vocal, as well as parent tracks for high-, medium-, and low-frequency information. I'll also go ahead and add markers for each important part of the vocal— inhale, start, roar/growl, wind down, exhale kind of thing. How do you collaborate with other departments, such as game design and development teams, to ensure the audio complements the visual and gameplay elements? PH: The earlier I can get into conversations with the other teams, the better off we'll all be. A big learning curve for me was figuring out how to talk to non-sound designers about sound-specific things. Often, it's a matter of finding references that make sense to everyone, but don't limit us in style or direction. Saying something like, "Do we want this to sound like Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon?" is way more limiting than "From a scale Presley Hynes