The final deliverable
The Original Video
Pre-production (planning)
Ha!.....Yasssss......about that....
A short story of how we pivoted and adapted a new plan...
Initially we had an interesting project lined up for project 1 which involved working alongside a game developer who was going to make a game that involved an alien creature stalking you throughout the game. This project required Foley sound, ADR and an implementation of FMOD to react and change the music atmosphere according to the game state. Long story short, by end of week three, two of the programmers for the project pulled out and the project was in limbo. Joe at the time was working on a side project that was to replace the sound assets for a game intro scene of Dead Space 2. We decided go all out on Joe's side project.
Production - The process
We first began by identifying all of the main events that take part in the scene as it was taught to us by Nick in the week 3 when preparing for ADR cues. Once these cues are identified you can then use markers inside ProTools to mark out the key frames within the video to map out the sounds.
During week 4 we booked back to back sessions in the C24 and audient B with the live room. While in the C24 we used the Foley room to record the whooshes from coat hangers and the plastic water pipe. After which we recorded the some of the body impact sounds.
When we went to my place on the weekend we recorded the ADR script for the necromancers in my home studio and finished the tracking for each of the creatures.
During the next day I talked with my wife and she agreed to voice Dayna who was the character on the intercom. For her first time doing ADR I was impressed on how well she picked it up and began acting the lines after I showed her some of the footage from the original video. During this tracking session we used my home system that used a version of Cubase. I then exported the wav files after cleaning them up and normalizing the file. I took the exported files and created a session folder within ProTool's called VOX to put the Necromancer and Dayna's lines into to as well as the previously tracked Isaac and Franko's lines.
After recording the lines we recorded the Foley elements and started with each character's walking sounds and footsteps. We tracked Isaacs walking with Joes soft soled shoes and used the tiled Foley board available in outside of the Audient B. To simulated the sounds of the Necromancers jumping onto the flow I took of my shoes and spread my toes out to simulated webbed feet as I walked onto the tiled surface. The Soft fleshy sounds that was created perfectly matched the footsteps of the Necromancers chasing after Isaac. We used a wet rag and Joe tapped the sounds out on top of a flat table. We used the Zoom H6 with shotgun attachment to record most of the Foley elements.
We then recorded the crazy sounds of the flesh bat since this character was like large manta ray but walked on land with two claws on either side of its body. We used the large layer of rubber floor mat and ruffled it to create the fleshy flappy sound.
Then we recorded chest puncturing tooth sound with a piece of glass scrapping across the top of a piece of packaging foam. This created a sudden high pitched scrape that worked well.
Intercoms and icon messages
Team Work and team dynamics.
While working on the project Joe and I have worked on several projects together in previous trimesters and have grown to know each others strengths and weakness in sound design. Joe was a master at creating monster sounds with his mouth and also had a creative approach to turn almost any piece of workshop item into an instrument. I was semi-classically trained and have come to realize that the training was restricting my creativity. Joe on the other hand did not learn a musical instrument and was unbound be musical rules, thus he tried sound ideas that I would not have thought possible. Though when it comes to composing and scoring the backing track I am able to quickly create a suitable track for this project because I had already listened to a good deal of horror themed music for the Aliens. During the tracking for the voice overs for the monsters both Joe and I shared the task of recording and acting. The majority of the Foley sound effects and Atmos track was assigned to Joe while I composed the musical score. All in all we played to our strengths and the final result seemed to have met our expectation in a game.
Since we both had a passion for creating sound for video games in general we both wanted to make this project become a good portfolio piece, thus made the team work well since we both had a similar end goal which is to create sound and music for games.
Project Management Reflection
Looking back in hindsight had we planned the session in advance we could have saved a greater deal of time while tracking for each sound that needed to be created for each foley effect. For the first few hours in the first session we messed around with the recording gear and tracked many sound effects to build up the layers for each action and character in the scene. The issue with his approach was that we did began to overlap the layers and the layers became jumbled up as we did not focus the sound effects added later in the session for each character.
We should have first identified every character and object in the video first that will emit a sound or will create a sound in the final mix. Then we should have then worked systematically in working through the video and follow each character and recorded in detail all of their Foley sounds or dialogue before moving onto the next character or item. We learnt very quickly that we needed to record only Foley for one session then only VO for another to speed up the tracking process. Switching around from Foley to VO created a messy session and we ended up leaving bits out that needed to be rerecorded in future sessions. In future we should group several session together that are similar like all characters that have similar qualities should be recorded in one session like the Necromancers Voice overs should be all done in the one take.
Session setup
Buses buses buses
This was something that we learnt on the fly, after creating all Foley sounds for one creature we should have then bused all of the sound into a sub master audio track for the foley. This process should then be done with the Voice over and acting to go into a sub master audio track for the VO dubs. Then the two sub masters should then be bused into one whole character bus that will then be panned according its position in the film. By doing this way it would be so much easier to apply automation in the later stage during the mixing stage to balance and level sound as well as creating the
Characters characters characters
What went well and what did we learn?
From our perspective we are proud to have achieved a passable result as seen in the video. There were many things that went wrong from the start of this project but here is a list of things that I consider went well:
Great communication: Joe and maintained contact via FB messenger and mobile through out the project and thus small problems were rectified quickly
Commitment to quality: Since we both wanted a good portfolio piece we both worked hard and in excess of 40 hours over the three weeks to create and mix all the assets from scratch
Appropriate roles assigned: Joe and I have different skill sets but we were able to assign ourselves suitable roles from the start since we have worked together before on other projects
Sound assets we create to high quality: Joe and I recorded in studio as much as possible and with suitable mics