Audio Implementation

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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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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! :)

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Wwise Up On Air - Community Spotlight Feature

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I got a really cool shout-out from the awesome Damian Kastbauer on the Audiokinetic Twitch channel!

Damian checked out some of blog posts I made during my final year of university when I was working on an audio re-design for the Unity 3D Adventure Game as my final year honours project.

For this project, I muted all the original sounds and music running natively from the Unity audio engine, and designed and implemented new audio into the game using Wwise. As a method of logging my progress while working on the project, I wrote weekly blog posts about the challenges I would face trying to implement various audio features into the game, and how I eventually found solutions to said challenges…which usually involved a lot of tinkering in C# and breaking scripts!

Audiokinetic went live on Twitch. Catch up on their VOD now.

Thanks for reading my blog Damian!

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Milksop Games - EGX & Tranzfuser 2019

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After months of hard work, I got to attend EGX 2019 with Milksop Games at the London ExCeL Centre, and see Heads ‘n’ Tails on display at the big Tranzfuser stand!

I’ve visited EGX numerous times in the past as a regular attendee, but it was an altogether more special and unique occasion to actually take part in the event alongside an exhibiting team.

It was an incredibly rewarding experience to see members of the public playing Heads ‘n’ Tails. Watching people enjoying themselves and having a fun time playing a game that I designed audio content for were deeply gratifying, affirming and fulfilling moments I’ll always proudly remember.

Milksop Games on the Tranzfuser stand! It was so cool to see people come up and want to have a play on Heads ‘n’ Tails. The team noticed that players who played the game with the headphones on tended to get higher scores than those who didn’t, which was great to hear! Looks like all that time recording different goblin voice emotes paid off!

Lee helping a player to set their new high score on the leaderboard. Nicely done!

(Most of) the Milksop Games crew! From the left to right: Me (Audio Designer), Eli De Carteret (Level Designer), Cat Wiltshire (Prop Artist), Lee Stockton (Environment Artist), Alan Horton (Technical Designer) and Jasmine Streatfield (3D Character Modeller & Rigger). Big virtual shout-outs too to Laura Flinders (Environment Artist) our Italian teammates, Samuele Bandini (Concept Artist) and Diana Ulloa (Animator).

Heads ‘n’ Tails has been such a fun and enriching project to work on. I’m extremely grateful to the Milksop Games team for giving me the opportunity to come on board the project as Audio Designer. Working alongside such a talented team to help bring their vision for the game to life, and get to work so closely with all the different design disciplines was an exciting, challenging and inspiring journey from start to finish.

Heads ‘n’ Tails: Mythical Pet Shop is now live on the Milksop Games itch.io page, so you can check it out for yourself (and hear the various daft goblin sounds I designed first-hand!)

Post-EGX Updates & Game Coverage

Youtubers TheGrumpyBrit and BlindsideUK checked out Heads ‘n’ Tails: Mythical Pet Shop as part of their Tranzfuser coverage of EGX 2019. It was great to hear they enjoyed playing the game (and thought our pet designs were adorable!), but apologies for the stress!

We were lucky enough to get Jupiter Hadley to check the game out, and got some great (and fair) feedback in her write-up on Indie Games Plus:

Heads ‘n’ Tails: Mythical Pet Shop also got featured on Tranzfuser’s EGX video livestream. where Eli, Laura and Cat chat to the presenter and walk him through the gameplay on the Ice level.