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 107 to do?" Then we immediately dove in and started working on that design as well. At that point, we had tech and a concept working together, and it just snowballed from there. EM: Mark, how long does your team get to a project like this from starting on it until going gold? MP: Yeah, every project is different. Most of the titles within the Borderlands franchise have been three to four years total. Borderlands 4 was much more ambitious in scope, so it ended up taking a bit longer. EM: One thing I've always loved about the Borderlands universe is just how colorful and vibrant it is. It's not just gritty or dark like many games out there—it's stylish. How does that visual style impact your creative choices on the audio side of things? Julian Peterson, Associate Director of Music: Borderlands is a very vibrant, zany universe. In these games, music often has the job of being the straight man in the comedy duo. So the world can be zany, the characters can be ridiculous, but music's role is to communicate the seriousness and the threat of the world you're in. There are moments of levity where we might play a zany musical score, but for the most part, there's a counterpoint between those outlandish visual things that you see, and the tone that we're trying to strike with audio. MP: That's why I never get bored with the development of those games. There are no rails—you can get as crazy as you want to get. To Julian's point, you can also find opportunities to ground the zaniness of the experience. You can move in all sorts of different directions, and every title is different enough to make it feel like a whole new endeavor. MARK PETTY Managing Director of Audio BRIAN FIESER Sound Design Director JULIAN PETERSON Associate Director of Music ANDREW CHENEY Associate Director of Dialogue Design JESSE LEMONS Lead Tech Sound Design Andrew Cheney, Associate Director of Dialogue Design: For each of the Borderlands games, I always try to advance what we do with the dialogue. For this open world, we went much bigger and broader, to the point where we have about 2.5x as much dialogue as there was in Borderlands 3. One thing we wanted for sure was to make dialogue less generic, and let the enemies recognize what the player is doing specifically. We created a lot of conditional dialogue, and in this title we have hardly any generic dialogue. Enemies and NPCs can comment on the weapons you're holding, what missions you've done, and give you hints on what missions are available. We have a lot more dialog choices. In previous Borderlands games, there seemed to be a disconnect between the dialogue and the action that the enemy is doing. If you have an enemy that's running, attacking and jumps through the air, you might just hear a regular dialogue line—but the performance doesn't match their on-screen action. This time, we put a lot more care and effort into having the actors actually see the animation in front of them_that way they could perform their line to the animation to get it more in sync. This game was our first endeavor into that, but now the bones and the pipeline are there for future games to improve on with the animation team. We made some strides, as well as some other systems that we put in with dialog to made it more special. BF: Since Borderlands 4 has more of a grounded tone than our previous titles, we really wanted to match that with the sound design aesthetic. One of the pillars is us being grounded in organics, as opposed to synthetics. One of our goals was that every single non-diegetic sound would start with an organic sound, so for instance, a recording. That was one of the ways that we met that more grounded tone. PARTICIPANTS: PARTICIPANTS: PARTICIPANTS: PARTICIPANTS: