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 91 actually shipped. Early days on the project were just planning and ideation, building up that rapport with the team and getting the creative dialogue going. We did some exploratory recording sessions with Ludvig Forssell, trying to get some ideas of sounds he might want to have in the score. We knew Ludvig was going to ultimately write several hours of score, which is a significant amount of time, so we got into working on assignments right away. A lot of that is driven by the progress the team is making on the game. The biggest thing for us workflow- wise, given the amount of score that was going to be written and then recorded (and the amount of time between the recording sessions and the game being finalized), was to really work hard to make our temp music edits as final as possible. So that way when we received the final mixed assets, all we had to do was replace stems in our sessions, maybe do a little cleanup and reprint. That was something we had started doing toward the end of the first DEATH STRANDING, and it saved us a ton of time because as you get through the project, things start to compress. You're trying to do a lot of stuff right at the end of the project, including having more recording sessions. So we knew we had a really small window in which to do that temp-to-final replacement. And I think that was really helpful for our team. DE: I started on the trailer here with the SIE team in mid-2022. That was great because we got to establish the sound of the DHV Magellan and its interiors, as well as a few other moments. Once we established that, there was a constant callback to that trailer. All our sound designers referenced the trailer as we had reached such a level of completion for the team that the trailer became the model for everything that followed. EM: It seems like this project was touched by a lot of audio people and teams around the world. How was the audio work divided up amongst the teams, and did the separation present any unique challenges? AP: For the sound design team, we've been used to working in a global capacity. For other projects, we've worked with our US teams, Canada, the UK, Japan—all on the same project. So dealing not only with time zones, but also language barriers. We've already been able to hone in on all that pretty well within SIE. Toward the end of the project, we were able to expand those responsibilities to be more fluid, because every project comes to the point where there's a lot of things that need to get completed. And luckily, we were able to enlist the assistance of everyone internally at SIE and KJP to band together to get everything done. JF: We also enlisted the help of Vicious Sound, as well as Molinare to help us out with design and mix. Molinare supported on the final mixing of cinematics, as well as the localization mixing. We also had Foley editing support. Blake Collins, our Foley mixer at SIE, and I were solely focused on the actual creation of the Foley performances, with Foley cueing by Alchemy Post Sound. They're a specialist team, and they were able to help us discover and color the attention to detail that everyone wanted to get with the right textures for the Sound designer Juliet Rascon creating gore sounds for DEATH STRANDING Sam infiltrating an enemy camp