FEATURE GAME SOUND Kovats: “True to form for this
creative genius, the very first piece of music he delivered actually became the theme. He just nailed it from every angle, hit every emotive point, and what’s really interesting about Gustavo is that he doesn’t wait – he doesn’t say, ‘I need to see what the game is like before I make something’ – he wants to hear story points, character arcs and personalities – then he just goes off and creates these wonderful themes based on the ideas and imprints he’s getting.”
PROJECT UPGRADE
Inevitably, all of this high-level music and sound creativity was inextricably linked with the game technology, which underwent something of an upgrade throughout the project. Kovats: “As well as adding a ton of additional run-time mixing control, Jonathan (Lanier) had been writing and evolving code for obstruction and occlusion through the course of Uncharted 2 and 3 and had decided he could deliver real-time audio propagation of sound. So an emitter would actually send out ray casts, which would say, ‘Where am I? Is this a closed or open space? How closed am I? How filtered should I be?’ If the sound is going through a portal, what’s the reverb in the room that should be collapsed down into a mono sound and played through the portal into the next room to be treated by its reverb and so on, room to room, area to area. “He did a proof of concept and
both Bruce and Neil felt this was something that would set our game apart – not just for technology’s sake but for story-telling’s sake – and
TEAM MEMBERS
Game Director – Bruce Straley Creative Director – Neil Druckmann
Audio Lead – Phil Kovats Senior Sound Designer – Derrick Espino Composer – Gustavo Santaolalla
Sound Designers Steve Johnson Neil Uchitel Rob Krekel Erick Ocampo Mike Niederquell Bruce Swanson
Audio Programmer – Jonathan Lanier Sound Editor/Integration– Warren Post Dialogue Supervisor – James Barker Dialogue Scripting – Mike Hourihan & Mark Burroughs Sony PD Sound Team – in-game cinematics Soundelux DMG – Cinematics and Foley Studio and ADR recording Music Production/Integration – Jonathan Mayer & Scott Hanau
www.audiomedia.com September 2013 37
KEY EQUIPMENT
Pro Tools 10 HD & Sundry Plug-ins
Dynaudio Air 6 monitors Soundminer Pro Kontakt 5 EMS Synthi A
Sound Devices 722 Schoeps MK4/MK8 MS Sennheiser 416 Sony PCM-M10
that’s important. They felt it would ground the player in the space and in the darkness you would be able to tactically negotiate yourself around the world using sound. We fine- tuned it throughout the entire development and there was a lot of grunt work to map each route to every room technically in our level editor and carefully tune up to 12 different reverbs running live at any one time. But it was well worth it.” All in all the production took three
years to complete. Kovats reflects: “We’re really proud of the team – an amazing bunch of guys who really ‘got it’, dug in and worked very hard to create something special. We’re really lucky that people have noticed the love that’s gone into it.” Espino: “Towards the end of the
development, as we could see things really coming together I said to Phil, ‘I think this is going to be huge’. I just had a feeling – everybody was doing such amazing work and you found yourself really rooting for the game characters. Everything aligned to make this project what it is. I don’t know who can really take the credit. It’s such a huge collaboration, beautifully done.”
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