Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538144
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 81 Can you share any key challenges you encountered in creating Strata and how your team overcame them? Simon Ashby: We encountered many challenges, but that's what makes the development of new products fun! The development of Strata perfectly synchronized with the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020. So, it's been entirely developed with everyone from Audiokinetic's HQ office in Montreal working from home and our launch partner, BOOM Library, collaborating remotely from Germany and New Zealand. Perhaps the most crucial element for a product like Strata to work was the ability to standardize the effect plug-ins used in the construction of all the collections. We decided to port all the Wwise effects to VST3 and integrate the IEM suite of effects, but we still needed many more creative options. The stars were aligned, and BOOM was developing—for its own usage—ENRAGE, which is a sort of plug-in creator for building any imaginable effect chain. BOOM agreed to licensing ENRAGE with Strata, and with that in hand, production could begin. From Vision to Execution "We were dreaming of a multitrack SFX library, and were all well aware of the limitations of existing libraries and their inherent inflexibility." –SIMON PRESSEY Building the Framework Can you tell us about your role at Audiokinetic and how you were involved in the development of Strata? Simon Pressey: My primary responsibility is the ongoing development of Strata. With the special projects team and many other departments at Audiokinetic, I am involved in every step and detail of Strata, from design and designers, production, to release. I work closely with Simon Ashby and our Strata partner designers and started work on Strata before it had a name in 2020. Our first partners were BOOM Library, whom I have known since I was audio director at Crytek. We were in the initial stages of a Strata prototype, based on one of their collections. We were dreaming of a multitrack SFX library and were all aware of the limitations of existing libraries and their inherent inflexibility. Up until that point, we had not had the clarity of vision that Simon Ashby brought; it was too complex. We broke down the creation of a sound effect into its simplest components and from that, built up, with a lot of collaborative iteration, arriving at a Strata framework and workflow. Combining all our sound design experience in linear and nonlinear media, we created a production process to meet our high-quality standards and present cutting-edge sound designs in consistent, comprehensive, and, importantly, designer-friendly collections. Which takes us through to where we are now, with more than 50 collections in the library! Early Challenges It's clear you've been deeply involved in shaping Strata from the very beginning, not just technically but also creatively through your collaborations and vision for the library. How did you get started in sound design or interactive audio, and what led you to work on Strata? Simon Pressey: I came to game audio from a background in music and post-production. I had a 20- year engineering and producing career in music, with credits on more than 70 million sales of albums and remixes. In the late '90s, my musicians were all playing video games in the studio lounge between takes. They had the feed patched into the control room, and I could hear when a player died or a level was completed, so I could distract them back to making their album. The sound of the games was simple, strangely attractive, and I naively thought, "I could do it better than that." Ubisoft had just started to set up shop in Montreal, and I was at a point in my career where I had achieved all the goals I had set for myself when I started in music. I was pitched by the challenge of video games and joined Ubisoft to head up the new internal audio studios that Ubisoft had realized they needed to improve their games. I stayed on at Ubisoft until 2007, before leaving for BioWare, where I first used Wwise on Mass Effect 2. I spent the next 13 years honing my game as audio director and designer on many AAA games with EA, Sony, Crytek, Bethesda, and Reflector. Rethinking the Library Simon Pressey: In 2020, Simon Ashby approached me and asked me what I thought about sound effects libraries, and I said, "Well, it's a love-hate relationship. I have terabytes of library sound, and most of it I have not and will never use, as it's not useful for game audio. Yet I still buy new libraries with every new project, hoping that some of it will be useful. I spend lots of time trying to match up sound from different libraries because each only has part of what I need. I always buy construction kits but can never reassemble them to get the same results as the designed sounds, leaving me to wonder how they did it." He said, "We're on the same wavelength. We have an idea at Audiokinetic. I know it's a bit crazy. What if we created a sound library 2.0?" I was in.