The animated announcement trailer for Lost Skies that I worked on with Justin Andree (Blitz Audio) has won a platinum award at the 2023 MUSE awards!
Huge congrats to Justin and all the teams at Bossa Games, REALTIME, Rumpus Animation & Humble Bundle! I’m really thrilled to have contributed sounds and play a part in this very fun project! 👏🥳🎉
I worked for Blitz Audio on the sound design for the Lost Skies announcement trailer!
This was a really exciting project to be a part of, with lots of gorgeous details to dig into when designing sounds for the various characters, gadgets, and creatures of Bossa Games' awesome new game world.
I’m really looking forward to seeing and hearing what wonderful sights and sounds await us in the game itself!
The Zoom H2n recorder. Small but powerful!
I picked up a new field recorder, the nifty little Zoom H2n!
I've been getting more into stealth field recording after reading Paul Virostek's Field Recording: From Research to Wrap book, and I wanted to get a recording setup better suited to capturing sounds surreptitiously. After hearing lots of good things about the H2n and seeing several sound designers I follow use the device, I decided to take the plunge and grab one myself.
As it's quite a small recorder, the H2n is really good for capturing sounds in public spaces without people noticing that you're recording them! So far, I've been having a lot of fun recording train ambiences. The recording below is from inside a train carriage where I was able to capture some nice and quiet train walla from people indistinctly chatting. I used the H2n's onboard mics in the X/Y configuration:
This next recording is from a pair of Roland CS-10EMs plugged into the H2n, where I captured the sound of the train pulling into Dewsbury station. Really like how this one turned out, as you can really get the impression of the train going past your ears from left to right!
While it lacks some of the basic features, such as XLR inputs found on my other recorder, the Zoom H4n, the cool thing about the H2n is that it has a lot more mics built into it as preset configurations. The four main recording modes are Mid-side, X/Y, 2-channel surround and 4-channel surround, and each of these can be tweaked further for greater/lesser stereo width. This means that it's a really useful recorder to grab spontaneous recordings with when I'm out and about, without having to lug around a bunch of extra stands, cables and mics with me on the off-chance I find something interesting to record.
The slight drawback I've encountered with the unit so far is that the surround sound recording capabilities are not as good as I was hoping for. The H2n can record to a max sample rate of 96kHz and to 24-bit depth for the mid-side, X/Y and 2-channel blended surround modes, but if you want to make a discrete 4-channel surround recording, the device can only record to 48kHz/24-bit. Though 48kHz is the post-production standard sample rate, it would have been nice to be able to record at max quality to make it easier to pitch-shift your recordings without introducing a load of unwanted artefacts into your sounds.
Still, I'm having a lot of fun using the H2n as my go-to stealth recorder. Time to slink back into the shadows and find more things to record!
Made my first sound design reel! Picked a few sections from the various projects I worked on during the past year of my studies that show my implementation and sound design skills. It's rough and needs a lot of work, but hey for my first reel I'm actually quite pleased with how it turned out.
““...and there I was, in the final hour.””
So, the big day finally arrived. I submitted my assignment by 10:21pm, making use of the online submission process to buy myself a few more precious hours to mix in the D-Control 5.1 studio.
Objective complete!
Those final few hours in the D-Control made all the difference...I hope!
I used a Pro Tools HD iLok to make my final stems without having to delete tracks from my already maxed-out track count.
To complete my cinematic audio redesign, I bounced out the audio from my master mix session as a stereo audio file, and then added it into a new Pro Tools session containing the video file. This way, I was able to massively reduce the strain on my computer's CPU during the audio and video bounce process as all the main audio processing had been taken care of in the first audio-only bounce. Then, I bounced the audio and video to a QuickTime file, which I subsequently loaded up in MPEG Streamclip to convert the video codec from Avid DNxHD to H.264.
As I had to do the final audio bounce on my laptop (in order to make use of the some specific Kilohearts plug-ins), I couldn't use of Avid's Pro Limiter to do my final audio bounce. As an alternative, I used the Maxim plug-in on the Master output with the ceiling value set to -2.0dB.
On previous projects, I've usually set the Maxim ceiling value much higher (e.g. -0.3dB/-0.4dB), but after learning about inter-sample peaks, I decided to give myself more room for error and set it to -2.0dB as Maxim is not a true-peak limiter.
Listening back however (and looking at the final waveform) the sound in he really loud sections of the trailer gets chopped off when it hits the limiter. Ideally, I would have set the ceiling higher to prevent the 'squashing' effect, but I thought it would be a lesser evil than having big transient spikes going through a higher ceiling that could potentially clip the digital 0dB ceiling.
Final LUFS reading I took in the D-Control 5.1 studio. I subsequently dropped global clip gain by aprox 3-4dB after taking this reading, so hopefully my submitted video falls within the EB -23dB acceptable range.
It was my intention to include separate DEM stems alongside the main bounce as part and parcel of a professional delivery package. However, despite setting up and assigning the necessary buses and routing in Pro Tools, I ran out of time to get this done to a satisfactory level that I was happy with submitting. The main problem was simply an issue of volume - the stems were being routed properly, but they were far too loud and massively clipping during the printing process. In hindsight, I probably should have just stuck a hard limiter on each individual stem to stop them going into the red, but as this was just before the deadline I was in a bit of a panic, so I decided to focus on just getting the essentials done for the submission.
For future projects however, I'll definitely start thinking about stemming earlier on the process, as it would have streamlined my overall mixing process a great deal, and would possibly have bought me more time to mix to a higher standard in the final few weeks of the project.
During the final mix, I set up dedicated individual stems for DEM and VO stems, but I ran out of time to get these done to a standard I was happy submitting before the looking deadline. Next time!
