Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1533995
Eric Marks MPSE: So Ludvig, how much time do you get to work on a cinematic sequence like this? Ludvig Forssell, Composer: Well, this is a special one for me because this was really my fi rst job at Kojima Productions after joining. I was working on this originally as a trailer for the 25th anniversary of Metal Gear at the time. This cinematic came out way before the game actually did. And for that fi rst trailer, we only did the Japanese voiceover, so that's what people fi rst heard. In a way, the game's lead composer, Akihiro Honda, was testing me out for the gig with this sequence. I think we spent more time than we'd usually spend— it was weeks and weeks of trying things out, fi nally playing it back for Hideo, and him picking out things that he liked and wanted us to bring out more. For instance, the famous stinger, that "dah d- d- dah," thing, for example, he loved. So we learned more and more into that as we worked on this cinematic. I joined Kojima Productions in January 2012. I started working on this when it was pretty close to a locked cut already. They'd already been doing motion capture and working on prototyping the game and this cinematic sequence for a while. There was a lot of back-and- forth, especially with it being my fi rst thing that would be presented to the world and for the entire game, so we wanted to make sure that we got it right fi rst time around. EM: Let's stop the video there. So, there are several moments in this where there's a J.J. Abrams-style lens fl are that goes full bloom in the camera, and then we hear this stinger that, in the fi lm and TV world, that could be music, or it could be covered by sound e ects editors. How did your team approach moments like that? LF: So that's all on the sound design side. It's a fun thing to talk about because that was a huge conceptual thing. That sound eˆ ect, the "shrang" sound, became a throughline throughout all of this game and then Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain afterward, with them adding that sound eˆ ect to moments like coming outside from a dark room, that blinding light hitting the lens. It defi nitely was a conceptual thing throughout the whole story of Metal Gear Solid V, for this one as well as The Phantom Pain. This trailer obviously came out as the Japanese-only The opening credits of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes Helicopters taking off in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes Snake sneaking in the shadows in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes 50 M PS E . O R G