FINAL CUT FORZA MOTORSPORT 5
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John Broomhall, Lance Hayes and Paul Lipson at Avatar Studios Credit: Harry Amyotte
these emotional beats – plus the whole thing sets a cinematic tone for an epic game.” Combs continues: “During the race itself, we needed to be especially selective with our instrumentation choices, using orchestral colours differentiated from the car sounds to avoid confusion or a clash – car audio is a huge feedback cue for our audience so we sculpted music around it and kept away from the centre channel.” Wiswell adds: “We also wanted the race music to
react to the action, like an extra layer of game-play cues to help you, so there are music shifts depending on certain race conditions… What’s your position? Is it the first or last lap? Are you in a pack of cars or out on your own? Are you working your way through the field approaching other cars? The music ebbs and flows and swells in response to these parameters.” With FMOD Studio their chosen middleware,
Combs was able to construct a complex modular interactive music replay system, deploying thousands of stems produced during the music creation process. A complex nested event structure provided carefully timed transitions between music ‘modules’, effectively combining non-linear music triggers with a linear playback system via markers and destinations.
MUSIC MIXING
preparation process, as well as providing mixes for the commercially released soundtrack, the lion’s share of which was undertaken by Jon Rook, one of the great staff engineers here at SoundLab (our multi-room studio facility). In addition, I also provided some guitar work and wrote/produced some ancillary compositions for the team. (We also help out with car recording.) “The raw sessions from Skywalker Sound and
Mike Caviezel, audio production director, Microsoft Game Studios Central Media Team
“I supervised the interactive music mixing and stem 30 March 2014
Avatar were around 100GB, which is a beast to move around. Rather than clog up our network with that sort of transfer size, we would actually just drop the sessions onto an external drive and walk them from room to room, depending on where they needed to be at a given time (still
waiting for a 100GB thumb-drive to hit the market). Session backups were then handled by our Retrospect software and Drobo drive array. “These sessions were mixed on a PT9 HD2 rig, using a D-Command for fader control, and Genelec, ADAM and Aventone speakers for monitoring. Our plug-in ‘standard kit’ always incorporates Altiverb and Speakerphone, everything SoundToys makes, Komplete from Native Instruments, Iris and Trash from Izotope, Pitch ’n Time from Serato, and numerous bundles from Waves. We’ve also got some key hardware boxes, such as a Manley Massive Passive, an Eventide Orville, some Lil’ Freq EQs from Empirical Labs, and an API 2500 main bus compressor that we like a lot.”
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RACE TIME Naturally, in a racing simulation, the sound of each of the 200+ cars is crucial. Having made racing games since the original Xbox launch in 2001, Microsoft Studios has a huge archive of high- fidelity recordings with new engine types added continually as games require, or as singular opportunities present – from a stock Honda Civic, to a specially modified Ferrari. One notable addition to FM5 was a Formula 1 car. Through a licensing agreement with Lotus F1, Wiswell accessed Renault Sport F1 near Paris, to record an engine on the factory’s engine dyno. “They have some really amazing technology – we could do pretty much anything with the car, but in a completely controlled environment,” Wiswell explains. “For instance, they could just push a button and give you Kimi [Räikkönen’s] pole- winning lap at a certain circuit. We apply our own secret sauce to car recordings but the basic premise is to record as many things as possible that you need to reproduce, and chop those recordings into little pieces to be reconstructed in the game at run-time, depending on whether the car is accelerating, decelerating, or held at a steady state.”
Combs: “I can’t go into specifics on mics, but
typically, with the car on a dyno (meaning we can drive it fully under load while stationary) we approach it like mic-ing up a drum kit. You walk round the car, get down into the low angles, looking for the sweet spots, then you start placing mics.” The resultant car engine components were assembled within the FMOD tools and positioned in a 3D model with say, exhaust or intake becoming a 3D object positioned relative to where it lives on the car in question. Combs: “So, part of the 3D system is that when you’re behind the car on a chase view camera, everything sounds in front of you, but in cockpit view, you’re able to localise sounds around you – say, an engine in front and exhaust behind.” But, according to Wiswell, the biggest win the
10-strong sound team gained from the enhanced power of the new Xbox One hardware was in the area of environmental effects. “I felt we could work more on making the car feel like it’s really seated in the world with the sound reacting more closely to its environment,” he says. “This became a big focus early on and we tried several ideas, modelling early reflections independently of reverb and using multiple reverbs at different parts of the track,
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