Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
96 M PS E . O R G connect everything together and make the dialogue feel seamless with the soundtrack. AP: Yeah, as Justin was mentioning with Higgs—it's a super dramatic moment with a cavernous vista as a backdrop, but initially there was just a general large exterior reverb and delay. After playing up the echo for dramatic effect, we ended up matching the delay time to the BPM of the final song that was implemented in this section of the game. It ended up being this weird hybrid between matching the size of the space visually, and also complementing the emotional narrative climax in a way that went beyond mere realism. EM: Joanna, was there anything about your Foley approach on this game that differed from how you would approach working on other projects? JF: When we started watching the dailies, I immediately realized that there will be so many moments in the story where Foley might be the only sound element that can elevate and color the performances, themes, and environment. It brought me back to the earlier days in my career working in the New York independent cinema scene. We had many moments in the story where the drama wasn't just in people's voices—it was how they distanced themselves from one another, how people held each other and reconnected. After working at SIE for so many years, it was nice to go back to the goals I had in independent cinema: If Foley were played solo, it should tell the entire emotional interaction between the characters. To ensure we had a firm grasp of performance, we requested feeds of the actors' head mounted cameras so we could see their emotions during the Foley sessions. It was crucial to be able to actually look at the actors' performance moment to moment. It allowed us to treat the scenes more like independent cinema. There were also times where the Foley team had to go full maximalist. Blake Collins, our Foley mixer, found inspiration from his work on superhero and science fiction films. As a team, we're able to transition between the more textural personified cinema with the bombastic fight scenes. There were other times where we pushed ourselves. Instead of using realistic and scientifically accurate props, we'd look for more expressive props. For example, when Sam returns to his room on the DHV Magellan, he sits down in his bed. The first time we performed that sound, we made the Foley sound pretty realistic: a harsh, hard, metallic sound, an uncomfortable bed in a submersible. However, we realized there that we were losing an opportunity to express how he feels. Derrick inspired us to go back and try it differently. So even though you don't see springs, we added those to his bed sonically to help illustrate Sam's body language. The creak and crunch acted as an expressive instrument to show his exhaustion and some of the psychological pain and grief he's going through. We also had very expressive and impressionistic characters. Dollman was especially difficult to Foley. Derrick, Blake, and I went back-and-forth on that several times to try to solve this riddle: "How do we let this character be full of cinema?" We tried everything from vintage cameras, to different shakers and different musical instruments to try to play them out, and we weren't quite sure how to balance these things. Ultimately, we realized that even though our teams were global, came from different cultures, and spoke different languages: Sound itself is still the universal language amongst us. So instead of going back-and-forth purely through written notes, we started sending each other ideas through sound. We asked ourselves: "What are you feeling? What are you hearing? What is the team feeling and hearing? Can we create something at least temp, even if it's for five seconds, so that we Dollman (special appearance by Fatih Akin) The final set of Foley props selected for Dollman's movement Sound designer Kei Matsuo and Foley mixer Blake Collins finding the weight for heavy cargo