most eerie squealing gate sort of sounds. We used a lot of water phone, too — a pot filled with water surrounded by a circle of metal tubes of varying lengths, so when you pour water in that and strike the tubes it has an eerie sound.”
Sean Murray used string effects to create unease in Black Ops.
Murray, who started in the busi-
ness scoring soap operas (Guiding Light), then moved to TV (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and films before land- ing in gaming with Activison’s True Crime: Streets of LA, has found a new level of acceptance quite different than that of film. “I like the pace of gaming,” he says.
“I like the time to flush out ideas, and in gaming you have all these technical geniuses that don’t think they’re ge- niuses when it comes to scoring a game. Gaming folks are computer geeks, really, a little less glamour but with a hell of a lot of appreciation for what a composer can bring to the project.A lot of film directors are real fans of film scores, so they have very specific ideas of what they’re looking for, whereas the game guys are like, ‘You know what, that’s your exper- tise, man, bring it to the table.’”
IRON MAN 2 For Marvel’s Iron Man 2 game
trailer, Studio West (www.studiow- est.com) chief post engineer Mark Kirchner was well prepared to deal with the headaches associated with post audio.“The trailer is constantly changing in duration,” he says, “right up until the 12th hour; Sega needs to approve this segment, but legal says,‘We have to take that phrase out,we don’t want to hear such and such a word,’ and that shortens the trailer by three seconds, but our music’s already been scored, so we go back and re-score, and the same goes for re-conforming effects and dialogue, and we have to add and
32 Post • March 2011 www.postmagazine.com
