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 85 given moment is what you need to be hearing, as well as what you want to be hearing—and that everything is in conversation with everything else. Looking back, what aspect of the sound effects or Foley work are you most proud of? Drew Elder: I had the privilege of helping organize and direct the Foley recordings for our handheld reloads, along with our directors. Based on my previous experiences as a musician, I just know that when you get everyone in a recording studio whose chemistry is fresh—there's a period of initial scrutiny and hyper-fixation that can happen as everyone in the session starts to develop a shorthand with each other. I also knew in our own libraries we really needed to bolster our chain-fed light machine gun recordings. So, I tried leveraging that initial nervous hyper- fixation headspace by strategically listing our LMG content first, with the largest amount of depth in the recordings. I think the result really shows. There are just some sounds with LMGs you can't fake with Foley props. You need the real thing, and you need dozens of variations of it in every different cadence and style. The shining example of this is the L110 reload cycle. Our animation team went hard and added tons of awesome nuance to this gun in particular. If we hadn't spent the hours capturing every nuance we could think of, that weapon would have sounded way less grounded and authentic. After a project of this scale, what do you carry forward, and what does recognition from organizations like the MPSE mean to the team? Mari S. Minto: One of the biggest lessons I keep coming back to is collaboration. So much of what we've talked about comes back to people listening together, reviewing together, experiencing the game together, sharing ideas, and learning from one another. That's when the magic happens. That's one of the things I enjoy most about game development. You're never really done learning. Every project teaches you something new, and then you take those lessons into the next one. We are always grateful and humbled by this sort of recognition. In this case, it also gave the team a boost. Projects like these take years to make, and they are complex and challenging. It's nice to see that effort recognized. For me, it's a recognition of the team: the people who spent all this time recording, designing, implementing, engineering, reviewing, and refining the experience. Most of all, it makes me happy and proud of what we accomplished together. Jeff Wilson: Mari said it perfectly. It all comes down to building a team that loves collaborating and working together. Our Audio Team, working from four major EA Studios across North America and Europe, really outdid themselves on Battlefield 6. We started this project with a "One Team" mindset, building trust and commitment across the entire Audio Department. It doesn't matter what studio or time zone you're in; we're all Battlefield audio. It was amazing to see how strong our team became because of that mindset. And yes, we're always grateful when our team is recognized for their hard work and dedication to craft. We'll certainly carry all of this with us as we move forward on Battlefield.