Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 99 you have to hold onto your baggage differently and watch how you walk is important. And wind direction, like turning the camera toward the wind, you get to see a different effect and you hear things changing. We had to actually prioritize the mix of these in ways that other games don't need to. There's a lot of parts in the game that are very emotional. And not just in cinematics—you're actually in gameplay experiencing an emotional moment, whether it's a climactic boss fight or a tender moment. We had to take these case by case and look at how we could shape the rest of the soundscape around the music and the dialogue. For the opening mission, where you're walking along the ridge of the mountains, the song "Minus Sixty One" by Woodkid was customized specifically for the mission, and because of the way it was integrated, we could take a lot of those parameters and push certain sounds out of the way to make room for the music. But then when the music would die down, depending on where you were walking, we would bring certain sounds up. In one of the boss battles with Neil toward the end of the game, it's a very emotional moment. The music is heartbreaking and you feel his struggle. You're learning more about him and what he's going through. At that point, Ludvig's score is so good that I'm like, "I don't want to hear anything else but this amazing music." So we actually created a parameter that was tied to only that song that completely changes the mix and softens the sound design, and plays up certain things to make it feel like an emotional dream and less of a tactile experience. At that point, I don't really care what I'm doing. I care about why I'm doing it. We also did this in other moments of the game that were more music heavy. We would adjust the mix to make it less about the sound effects and more about the emotions. In each of those sections, it was so subjective that we had to treat it on a case-by-case basis. In the mix, there were a lot of sounds playing simultaneously due to the nature of the complexity of the game's mechanics, so it wasn't always possible to get good microdynamics. By microdynamics, I mean hearing specific transients ducking things out of the way for gunshots and explosions. We were doing that, but there's so much rich sonic information happening that we tried to shift our focus more toward macrodynamics. It might not be possible to get a bunch of really sharp hills and valleys within a battle, but between different types of gameplay—in a battle, in stealth, delivering packages, or covering your mouth to prevent yourself from being detected by BTs— we tried to push those as far apart from each other as possible. If you have worked on a movie or video game and taken a walk by the concept art department, you see they have a sort of "color guide" of how the mood and environment shifts visually throughout the experience. So we try to do that with the sound as well, having bigger gaps in overall volume between different types of combat. So that way, you're on this big roller coaster. Molinare also did a lot of really great work in this space too, in regards to the cinematics —those are a whole different ballgame. We actually worked really closely together to make sure that going from gameplay to cinematics and back had consistent mixing and a seamless audio presentation as well. EM: Justin, with some pretty realistic- looking human characters in this game, was localization a challenge to be able to maintain lip sync in a project of this scope? JW: Localization is really important to us, and it was something we worked on very closely with KJP and our localization team. We came together early to set the standard for what we wanted across the gameplay and the cinematics, especially when it came to tight lip sync and matching the performance as closely as possible. Even for the English source, it was a Sound designer Chris Kokkinos field recording sand dunes in Font's Point, Anza-Borrego State Park