Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538144
Game Trailers & Cinematic Sound Let's talk a little about Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which just earned a couple of Golden Reels for Best Sound. What was your role on that project, and what went into creating a sonic experience that could live up to the franchise's legacy? Charles Deenen: As a team, we've been fortunate to have worked on Call of Duty cinematics and trailers since 2013. My role usually is co-sound supervisor, as well as part of the mixing team. We also work on ambiences, UI sounds, prototypes, and more. The whole COD team is immensely fun and open to work with, which makes those projects a blast. Each Call of Duty project brings its own challenge such as the setting year, style, and feel change per iteration. Black Ops 6, as led by Scott and Bryan, defined an Old School Bond-type setting, which allowed us to hone back to the past. While games like Modern Warfare, as led by IW's Stephen and Dave, allow us to go hardcore, hard- hitting. It's great to hear how every Call of Duty project has its own vibe and unique set of challenges. When it comes to trailers, how do you tackle building a strong sonic arc, especially when you're working with early visuals, temp VO, or placeholder effects? Charles Deenen: Our company's heritage is working on sound for trailers. We've worked on trailers for 20+ years, so we have a powerful, robust pipeline for it. Our producers ensure the designers have the right answers as early as possible. Questions like, what are the iconic sounds, which are temporitus sounds (terminology for temp sounds that execs have started to love), what style of sounds are wanted, the role of music, and locked scene stability, etc. In many cases, we have to start on trailers when storyboards, temporary captures, or CG are barely done. This is mainly to get past greenlights and early exec reviews. We try to work with as much completed picture as possible and would rather start sometimes a bit later to avoid the eventual scene reworks. Unlike film, where a filmed scene is pretty locked, in games, the scene can completely change. Cameras, angles, density, characters, action, and more. With film, you'd conform to the new edit, but with game trailers, that edit can be like 100% new each time you see it due to the visual changes. To accommodate earlier starts, most of our clients have adapted to the traffic light system, where they mark a scene with RED if it's totally going to change, ORANGE if it's the right scene but might change a bit, and GREEN if it's really representable. It's sometimes our only way to get done on time. Well, that is, until the next level of exec reviews, which can completely change the trailer. With most trailers, if music is done, we start with tempo-mapping the trailer. This, in turn, will let us place sounds to musical timing easier. When you have 2.5 minutes of picture, the music and sounds need to become cohesive. Applying the same timing and the same musical key for FX is often fundamental to the epic style of trailers for most games. There are also ways that we start with no music, no sound. In those cases, we tempo-map the visuals and build a more precise click track for the picture editors to work against, knowing that the music will follow that map. It enables them to experiment with timing and feel well before music is even part of the picture. When you're cutting for trailers of iconic games like Call of Duty or Star Wars Battlefield, how do you balance honoring the franchise's signature sound with keeping things fresh and exciting? Charles Deenen: One of the early conversations we have with new clients is surrounding this subject. We tend to get very granular with knowledge about what sounds need to be representative, and which sounds are enhanceable or fully changeable. A lot of the game trailers will have a few iconic sounds, but the rest is material which we design. This is due to the ith a career spanning decades and credits on some of the most son- ically ambitious game trailers and vehicle-focused titles, Charles Deenen has become the leading voice in cinematic and trailer sound design for games. From his early days composing on the Commodore to co-owning the award-winning Source Sound Inc., he continues to push the limits of what game audio can be. Fresh off his team's 10th Golden Reel Award for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Charles talks about the art of trailer sound, the poetry of engines, and how Source Sound continues to evolve across games, film, and beyond. W 98 M PS E . O R G