2020

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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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The Spooky Jar - Kirsten McDowell

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Boo!

I recently finished up some sound design work for my good friend and environment artist Kirsten McDowell on her Spooky Jar project, so here’s a quick post now that the project’s wrapped.

The Spooky Jar is an environment art scene that Kirsten made for her final year honours project at Futureworks. The bar’s design is inspired by the The Whiskey Jar, a whiskey bar (who’d have guessed?) in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. Unlike the Whiskey Jar however, The Spooky Jar is home to some cheeky ghosts and ghoulies who have come out to play, and presumably neck a few drinks along the way!

You can see the scene in full detail and get more info on the design process by heading over to Kirsten’s ArtStation page to check out the bar and its 3D-modelled props in all their glory. Plus, while you’re in a link-clicking mood, you should also follow her on Twitter too so you can keep up with the rest of her environment and game design work as well!

Here’s a flythrough video showcase of the scene:

I worked on the sound design for this video showcase, which was a lot of fun! The brief was to create a spooky yet cosy vibe for the piece through area (non-positional) and source (positional) ambience sounds.

Most of the sounds I designed were sourced from my sound effects library, but I did get chance to do some field recording for a few choice elements in the scene. For example, to record the ouija board glass movement sounds, I grabbed my trusty (but hissy) H4n recorder, a wooden chopping board and a nice, weighty glass tumbler and had a good ol’ scrape about! After chucking the recordings into Reaper and applying a bit of EQ and Brusfri to remove top-end hiss and room tone, I had this:

I also recorded this creaky, crackly book which I intended to try and use for some of the dusty paper menus and posters in the scene.

However, although these crunchy book sounds were cool, I felt they didn’t work too well with my audio direction for the scene, and that they sounded a bit too over the top and out of place for the I overall mood I was aiming for, so I took them out. Not to worry though - I’ll no doubt go back to this recording for the next project that needs some extra crunchy ice sound design I think!

As I was mixing my sounds to a linear piece of media, and not implementing them directly into the UE4 project, I decided to replicate the feel of the audio being played back by the game engine by keeping a lot of the positional source sounds (door creaks, neon sign buzzes etc.) mono. This way, I could pan them around the environment according to the position of the camera, to give the feel the player is actively moving around the scene in engine in real-time.

Here’s a shot from my Reaper session where I’ve used track panning to position diegetic source sounds in the scene in relation to the position of the camera. In this sequence of shots (02:15 - 02:28) the camera gradually moves from left to right through the environment, so I positioned the creaks and closing sounds of the door in this shot according to where an in-game listener on the camera would likely pick them up.

Anyway, it’s coming up to closing time on this post, so thanks for having a look and listen to the sounds of The Spooky Jar - it was a short but sweet project that was great to work on! Stay safe out there folks! :)

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2020 Update

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Media City

Howdy doody folks!

Hope you’re all safe and well out there - at the time of writing, everything’s still in lockdown here in the UK with the Covid-19 pandemic. Whilst things are on a bit of a lull at the moment and the flow of time itself feels convoluted, I thought now would perhaps be a good time to write a quick post on what I’ve been up to lately.

It’s been a while since my last blog post, and despite the scary state of the world at the moment, 2020 has been a pretty busy year for me so far, despite all the chaos. I can’t go into any specifics, but I will say that I’ve worked at Immotion Studios on a couple of super fun projects throughout February and March, and I’ve been working as a freelance sound designer for We Make Audio since early Feb!

I’ve also got a couple of half-finished projects I’ve had on the backburner for absolutely ages now, so I thought now would finally be a good time to actually get these finished up and put out in the world. These include my Steampunk Robot sound pack, as well as some music tracks from a couple of different projects that I never got around to releasing. Watch this space for a little bit longer, and I’ll have them out as soon as possible…I hope!

I’ve also been getting a lot of emails from audio students asking for help with Wwise implementation issues in the Unity 3D Game Kit, so I’m considering possibly making some kind of short tutorial or walkthrough to act as a standalone guide that hopefully helps people out? If you’re reading this and that’s something that would appeal to you, then definitely get in touch and let me know if there’s something in particular you’d like me to cover - I’ll see what I can rustle up when I get chance.

Stay safe and make some cool sounds! :)