NEWS GAME SOUND Creative Thinking
OMUK’s Mark Estdale talks to John Broomhall about the dialogue specialist’s recent studio reconfiguration and refit, new mic pres, and working on the fifth iteration of a classic Britsoft game franchise Broken Sword: The Serpent’s Curse.
YOU’RE WELL-KNOWN AS A GAME DIALOGUE SPECIALIST – WHAT’S SPECIAL ABOUT GAME DIALOGUE RECORDING?
Games are the first media to truly deviate from the active storyteller/passive audience relationship. The audience needs to interact and make choices or
Mark Estdale OMUK
nothing will happen. The rules of creating a game are utterly different from all other media; the straight line of narrative is replaced by bewildering complexity. Immersion isn’t about absorption but engagement. The creative illusions are different too. What makes recording game dialogue special is that we’re not dealing with the linear journey, we are recording within a complex three-dimensional maze.
“A studio that is perfectly good for the simple straight line is counterintuitive for the complexity of games.” Mark Estdale
WHY TAKE A PERFECTLY GOOD RECORDING STUDIO AND RECONFIGURE IT SO MUCH? WHAT ISSUES WERE YOU ADDRESSING?
A studio that is perfectly good for the simple straight line is counterintuitive for the complexity of games. We wanted the studio to be a game-centric and fluid
creative space. For example, having the design around the engineer in the sweet spot and in control was a factor that didn’t make sense. We wanted the space to be all about empowering performance and the creative relationships. We wanted the engineer to be more like a boom-op or
recordist on a film set – there to capture everything but to remain invisible and unobtrusive. So the director is the core of the control room and engineer and tech are off-centre. Another flow breaker is talkback so we removed the button
and have it open which removes isolation and demands that everyone present is focused.
WHAT ARE YOUR CREATIVE DIALOGUE TOOLS (CDT) AND WHAT DO THEY ACHIEVE?
In the studio CDT is the tech that puts everything into the hands of the director. The goal with the studio design was to make the essential relationship
between the cast and director central. CDT puts the script and all pertinent visual and audio game assets at the fingertips of the director enabling him or her to immerse the studio in any moment in the game world instantly. A game may have millions of performance-pertinent reference
assets. No standard studio tech is designed around handling and navigating such. Delay kills flow, CDT empowers it. One actor recently described working with CDT as the “difference between taking a flying volley and taking a penalty”. One is like connected poetry in motion while the other is a pretty predictable set piece. CDT empowers the volley.
22 October 2013
Juanma Delfin, studio director, testing the set up
WHAT WOULD BE A PRACTICAL EXAMPLE OF HOW YOU WORK ON A PROJECT LIKE BROKEN SWORD 5?
BS5 is an adventure game with about 100,000 words of dialogue. Charles Cecil, its creator, Rolf Saxon, the lead actor, and I wanted to record as much of the
dialogue as we could ensemble. CDT maps the script so in pre- production it was easy to schedule and budget. As CDT manages relevant game assets it can track and recall all the recorded lines as they are being recorded, so in session, no-one has to tick lines off or take notes – we can ensure the flow and keep the focus on the performance. I think the results will speak for themselves.
WHAT WOULD BE TYPICAL LINE/WORD COUNTS FOR MAJOR GAMES? HOW DO YOU MANAGE THOUSANDS OF AUDIO ASSETS IN MULTIPLE LANGUAGES?
Games are typically huge compared to movies – 100,000+ words of recording is not unusual but size and complexity is never really an issue even over
multiple languages. It doesn’t matter if it’s 10 lines or 10 million, performance is all about the moment. The key to management is bulletproof pre-production, workflow, and asset management, and that’s exactly what CDT enables for us. A person cannot track millions of assets but computer programs can and do.
YOU MENTIONED YOU’RE USING SOME BRAND NEW MIC PRES – TELL US MORE!
I’m a fan of great sounding mics but when it comes to performance I want the actors to be free of thinking about mics – so we experimented with the DPA 4060
and the d:fine attaching them to headphones so the actor could be uninhibited in movement. They worked fantastically for liberating performance but the audio quality obviously wasn’t like a 416, C12 or U87 so we were thinking about designing and building our own pres for the DPA 4006 so we could use it like the 4060. The guys at Sound Network knew we were using the d:fine and 4060s with novel rigs so when we set up the 4006 test they came round with the new MMP-ES hanging preamp, which was complete genius. We’re not using the pre as designed but it works perfectly and we’ve got the sound we want with the performance freedom.
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