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 97 can be inspired, and then try to extend that for the whole game?" Ultimately, we found our inspiration in puppetry. I spent some time backstage at a theater production. There were these massive puppets that were dancing on stage and they sounded so unique. I was like, "That's it. We need that. How can we reverse-engineer that in San Diego?" So we came back to our Foley stage and did several different versions, all referencing everything we had experienced—all the clicks, all the pops, all the clatter. And we're like, "Okay, express the state of cinema in this character in this way." And then we sent that off to KJP. DE: For Dollman specifically, Joanna gave us about five passes for a specific scene, and we sat there and muted and unmuted tracks until we finally arrived at something. I think Dollman really shined in the mix because Joanna and Blake were able to provide us with so much material that we were able to accent the moments that we wanted and it really sculpted the performance. Before I worked in games, I started in walkie-talkie dramas, and Foley is handled much differently in that. In my experience as an editor, if I see a bed, I want to hear a spring. It might seem insignificant, but these can work as dramatic hooks for the story, and that's why we add those sounds as well. When Sam goes home and he opens the drawer in his house, I said, "I gotta hear something in the drawer. I need to hear notebooks or junk or old batteries." I want things to be glued to the scene. It might be an older film sound aesthetic. Nowadays, a lot of sound effects seem to sit way in front of the mix—almost disembodied from the scene. But for me, I really like believing that what I'm watching is happening in that room at the distance the character is from the camera and the microphone. I really wanted it to feel grounded in the world. We were given such freedom to come up with something that would call back to the inspiration of Dollman, which was old stop motion. That is where Joanna came up with the idea of the camera clicks for some of the jaw movements and some of the eye movements too. We had to ground this crazy world so Foley was very powerful in being able to do that. I think it really sells the world. And I think the fans and the players, the people who love this game, picked up on it either consciously or subconsciously. AP: In this game, the Foley plays a different role in gameplay than other games. There's always a subtlety to gameplay. In other games, there's a lot of really awesome detail work that goes into the interactivity of the Foley, but even then, it's usually representing the locomotion of characters in a way that's not merely gameplay feedback. It's mostly immersing yourself in the world. As graphics become more realistic, you want to hear what you expect it to sound like by how detailed it looks. In some games, you get out of the river and can see that your pants and your shoes are wet, so you might want to represent that audibly as well. With this game, the actual act of traversing is its own gameplay loop in itself. Especially when Sam can wear different types of boots that have different properties. You have different types of cargo that you can carry, and depending on how much weight you're carrying, the player is going to be experiencing different types of controls. So all of that had to be represented with the sound. There's a lot more granularity in content for the Foley than most games of this genre, especially when it comes to how interactive it is. You know what you're carrying, but how heavy is it? Is it in your backpack, or are you holding it? And then how that's all interfacing with the animation, all the gameplay parameters and tags, all the recorded content, how those sounds can be manipulated at runtime or swapped out. Kei Matsuo did an amazing job managing all of this, and by organizing and expanding upon what was done in the first game, the player Foley not only became expressive, but also easier to work with. Foley props on the first DEATH STRANDING were mostly figured out, but it was further expanded on in this game. Everyone involved on the sound design side, the Foley side, and the implementation and programming side. It was a huge Herculean effort, but the character Foley in this game has such a different role, where even the most microscopic change to a sound can hopefully subconsciously help the player understand the gameplay and its relation to what's happening in the game's world. JF: One of my favorite memories working with our team and with the KJP team was when it came to getting that sense of weight on the packages. We had a system that was initially built on the first DEATH STRANDING, so seeing how the KJP team was able to do that, we were like, "Okay, what do we need to do to expand on this? And what new content do we need to record?" The team at San Diego, we spent some days on the Foley stage asking ourselves, "How do you convey weight?" In the first game, we had all these different modular pieces for different backpacks, and different elements of the packages. The team from the first game wished that they could have done a burden layer that is the summation of all this weight that's on your back. So we tried to convey that, and really tie the physicality of what Sam's doing with the struggle. It's poetic in a way—you got all this baggage, and you're trying to climb up this hill to save these other people in this other country that you haven't explored yet. In DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH, KJP added five new footstep surfaces that Sam traverses. A lot of these new surfaces were more