Editing

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Reel Talk - Showreel Review (28/10/21)

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I had my sound design showreel reviewed by Power Up Audio’s Kevin Regamey on the Reel Talk livestream this week!

I’ve been watching Reel Talk for several years at this point, but I’ve always felt nervous about putting myself forward for review as the standard of work is incredibly high, and (like a lot of people) I suffer from imposter syndrome pretty badly. However, after putting it off for so long, I realised that this was an opportunity that I simply couldn’t afford to let pass me by, so I sent in an application back in August.

Well, I’m so glad I did, as this was an incredibly eye-opening and useful experience - one that I wish I had signed up for a lot earlier in my sound design journey! I received lots of really useful feedback on my sound design pieces, my video editing choices and my overall website layout, all of which I will be using to inform and improve my work going forward.

Huge thanks to Kevin for taking the time to review and critique my reel piece-by-piece, I’m massively grateful to have had this opportunity.

Also, a big thank you goes out to the lovely Reel Talk audience, who kindly offered plenty of really great suggestions about material selection/web design as well, which I intend to implement ASAP.

So, I’m feeling really inspired and ready to get to work on the next reel - time to go find some cool clips to re-design!

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To Miss The Ending - BFI London Film Festival Best XR/Immersive Art Award

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Audience_Awards_Artwork.jpg

So, this is pretty exciting! To Miss The Ending, a VR film by idontloveyouanymore that I worked on as a sound designer for We Make Audio, won the first ever award for Best XR/Immersive Art film at the BFI’s London Film Festival’s online awards ceremony!

This was a really inspiring project to work on, and I’m thrilled to see that people have been enjoying watching (& listening to) the film over these the past few weeks!⠀
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Massive congrats to directors Anna West & David Callanan, and producer Steph Clarke, it was a pleasure to work with you and be part of such a lovely team!

Press Links

BFI London Film Festival 2020 Award Winners Announcement Post

Anna & David gave an interview to Upload VR about the film here:

DOK Leipzig

To Miss The Ending also screened at the 2020 DOK Leipzig film festival’s Neuland exhibition for extended reality pieces from October 27th - 31st.

Sundance

To Miss The Ending screened as part the 2021 Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier programme from January 29th - February 3rd.

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To Miss The Ending - We Make Audio

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I’m really pleased to announce that I’ve been working as part of We Make Audio on the sound design for idontloveyouanymore’s virtual reality film, ‘To Miss The Ending’!

The film has been selected as part of the BFI London Film Festival’s Expanded collection of interactive works, and has been designed for playback on Oculus Rift, Rift S and HTC Vive headsets.

“Imagine a world where there is no air left to breathe, no rivers to race a paper boat on and no parks to roam in. Environmental damage, job-automation, the breakdown of personal connections have led to a future where the best choice of survival is to upload your own memories into an automated AI cloud server and reconnect with loved ones in the vastness of the net. This hypnotic narrative unfolds around 5 characters, increasingly struggling to access their uploaded memories. Set in a breathtaking visual landscape, this dystopian future unravels slowly around you, leaving you challenged to re-think your own beliefs and actions. It’s an exploration of a possible future that says much about our present lives.”

As a sound designer for We Make Audio, I designed audio assets for various aspects of the project including ambient soundbeds, building construction sounds and glitchy visual effects, as well as performing dialogue editing and processing duties on the actors’ voice lines.

To Miss The Ending premieres online at the London Film Festival from Wednesday 7th October, and runs until Sunday 18th October. Free tickets for the film will be available from 21st September from the link below:

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School of Video Game Audio - Weapon Sounds + Project Asset List

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Designed the initial projectile shoot sound for the enemy spit plant in the Wwise Adventure Game this week.

To create this sound, I used a combination of monster and gun samples (SoundMoprh's Monster Within, Watson Wu's Battle Rifles and Pistols and Airborne Sound's Free Firearm Library) plus my own vocal recordings to create a punchy yet still organic projectile launch sound.

Inspired by a really cool talk on gun sound design by Barney Oram at last month's Game Audio North meetup, I split my sound design for the spit sound into several layers. These were:

  • Punch Layer - This initial layer contained a combination of bassy sounds to give the spit event a meaty kick. This layer includes a kick drum sample and the first transient from some shotgun blasts to suggest the poison projectiles are exploding out of the plant's mouth after a build-up of pressure.
  • Slime Layer - As a substitute for the traditional mechanical layer of a gun sound, I used several groups of slime/gore samples to emphasise the organic nature of the plant, and to suggest that the enemy generates the spit projectiles is a very messy process!         
  • Vocal/Character Layer - To further add to the disgusting/revolting feeling I wanted to achieve with the slime layer, I also included processed monster vocal sounds to suggest that the poison projectiles the spit plant launches at the player are being regurgitated up from the plant's innards before being projectile vomited at the player. Gross!
  • Tail Layer - This layer contained hissing vocal sounds I recorded to give a natural decrescendo effect to the end of the sound as it decays away.

I then imported these layers into Wwise and arranged them into various SFX objects and random containers within the play actions of the Enemy_EvilSpitPlant_ShootBullet event.

The Enemy_EvilSpitPlant_ShootBullet event in my Wwise project. Randomised pitch and volume offsets were applied to certain layers, and randomised delay offsets to the vocal and tail layers were used to vary the playback speed of the latter sections of the sound.

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School of Video Game Audio - Monster Sounds

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Made some fun monster sounds this week on the School of Video Game Audio's Wwise course. I had to design and implement the sound for the enemy Evil Spit Plant in the Wwise Adventure game.

Sound Design

I approached my design for the enemy plant death sound by first recording gameplay footage of the plant death animation. After watching this animation numerous times, I decided to break the plant death sound down into four constituent parts that matched the character's death animation. These parts were screams, gurgles, rustles and impacts;

Screams

For the scream sounds, I used samples from the Monster Within sound pack by Soundmorph. I wanted to get a short, punchy pain sound that would immediately indicate to the player that they had successfully killed the spit plant. I found a collection of small monster shrieks in this pack that fit my needs perfectly.

Gurgles

Directly following the scream, I wanted a longer, drawn-out death gurgle to go with the enemy plant's writhing death animation, to suggest that it's still in considerable pain as it thrashes around in its death throes. I recorded these sounds myself by making some croaky, gurgling noises in my throat - disgusting, I know, but hey, they sounded pretty good and that's what matters!

Recording comedic death gurgles in the VO booth at Futureworks. The dark environment really helped me get into character!

Having recorded my gurgles at 192kHz, I had considerable flexibility with regard to pitch shifting at the edit stage. I processed the gurgles by pitching them +1 semitone up and applying a generous amount of distortion before then running them through Krotos Audio's Simple Monsters plug-in. This made the gurgle sounds I recorded feel considerably more alien, gross and wet sounding.

Rustles

As the Evil Spit Plant is an organic creature, I wanted to include some natural, organic sounds in with the highly-processed and alien-sounding vocal layers to balance them out. The plant's death animation involves a lot of shaking and writhing around, so I thought including a rustling grassy layer to the death sound would help make the enemy feel more believable and grounded in the reality of the game world. I used some grass rustle samples from the Sonniss  Game Audio GDC 2018 bundle as the sounds for this layer.

Impacts

Finally, the impact layer was to act as the sound for plant's body hitting the ground as it dies. I used some recordings I had made during a recent trip to a nature reserve of hitting grass and other bits of foliage with my hands (yep, it looked really stupid but once again it sounded pretty good) as the sounds for this layer.

Wwise Implementation

The screams, gurgles, rustles and impacts were then imported into Wwise as separate layers, with each layer having its own dedicated random container. These random containers were then inserted into the Event_EvilSpitPlant_Death event as separate play actions.

The Enemy_EvilSpitPlant_Death event in my Wwise session. Each layer of the sound has its own random container, with voice volume and pitch offset randomisation applied. Independent delay settings on the play actions were set so as to give the collective death sound a nice unified rhythm.

With all the sounds integrated into Wwise at this point, I then applied a flanger effect to the scream and gurgle layers via the sound's Enemy_EvilSpitPlant actor mixer to accentuate the creepy, poison-filled nature of the creature even more.

I didn't want the flanger effect applied to the organic rustle and impact sounds, so I bypassed the effect on these layers. So, without further ado, here's the final Evil Spit Plant Death sound - voilà!