FEATURE GAME SOUND


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Espino continues: “My job


was very much to align with Phil on that and facilitate that sonic signature across the entire game. The game-play and the story themselves really guided us – Joel and Ellie are well drawn characters and there’s real drama going on, so you just don’t want to spoil that with any ‘tricky’ sound design – you want their world to stay as believable as possible. This led to a lot of back and forth and I had to dig my heels in a lot and remind people that first and foremost we were serving the story.” This naturalistic approach permeated the entire sound design from things you hear a lot of, down to the smallest one-off detail. Kovats: “A simple small example (spoiler alert) is when you play as Ellie and the cannibals attack you. There’s an animation where a guy grabs her from behind and she bites his arm. Now, in a movie, you’d probably put in an audible crunch or even a little ‘goosh’ sound. But we went with the sound of flesh lightly contacting a sleeve. It seemed right to let the animation and the actors sell the moment. It


34 September 2013


San Francisco ended up in the game sewers. Another of our sound designers spent a week in Rio running around with his mics recording in old kitchens and chicken coops while Phil collected some crazy forest ambience and icy and snowy footsteps while on a family trip to North Arizona. The ‘Bloater’ character is Erick’s (Ocampo) baby crying but don’t tell anyone.” As well as the team’s


Gustavo Santaolalla with Neil Druckmann at Ocean Way Studios


was unusual to have people trying to persuade us to oversell the moments more! But Neil (Druckmann) was kind of hands-off – he knew we were trying to make a very grounded sounding game where moments like that feel very real.” Espino: “At the other end of the scale would be the sounds and emotes that the infected humans make. It would have been easy to do the standard ‘let’s go find some hyenas and vultures and mix it all together’ but we had to come at it from the story standpoint. These people are


the ‘un-dead’, they’re actually sick humans. When I directed the actors, I told each of them, ‘be careful here. You’re not playing a monster. This is a very sad state your character is in – think of the worst flu you’ve ever had. Think about waking up from a nightmare then realising you’re not asleep and you can’t escape – a living nightmare.’ They loved it and we got some very dynamic drama in the creature sound using only human elements for the most part – another example of us reining it in rather than going ‘larger-than-life’. It


challenged a lot of people to actually step back from what they’d normally do.” Nearly all the game’s sounds


are homebrew recordings of one sort or another, with only items like explosions being constructed of some library elements – though heavily customised. Espino: “There’s a lot of original recordings, including wild track content from various team members’ trips around the world – for instance, I got some really great water recordings in Japan and some amazing distance knocks and bangs recorded on the headlands at


sundry extra-curricular recording sprees, Soundelux took the brunt of capturing an unprecedented amount of Foley to bring the texture and detail of the world to life. When it came to music


score for The Last Of Us, a thoughtful approach was again pervasive. Gustavo Santaolalla’s name had repeatedly come up when discussing music at the project’s outset but the team were somewhat hesitant about approaching the two- time Academy award-winner as he’d never scored a game before. When they did eventually make the same pitch to the musical maestro his response was essentially, ‘Okay, when do I start?’


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