Sound, Music and Voice
collide with the Bay Area Sound Department
Starcraft: Ghost, Knights of
the Old Republic, James Bond: Everything or Nothing – you name it, chances are
the Bay Area Sound Department is behind it.
“Silence is golden.” Who
really believes that? It has been said for years, but for what reason? Sound
is one of the things that makes us who we are. It’s how we communicate with
each other. It’s how our games communicate with us. And as technology
continues to evolve, it’s how we can communicate with our games.
To me, the key element of sound is music.
When I look back on all of the games that have truly meant something to me, that
mesmerized me, or that inspired me in some way, it’s the soundtrack that first
comes to mind. Final Fantasy VII was an amazing RPG, and Star Wars was a
ground-breaking movie. But the thing about them that stood out the most, and
the thing about them I will never, ever forget is the music. I could have used
any spectacular game (Resident Evil) and any spectacular movie (The Lord of the
Rings) as an example. The result is the same.
Loving music as much as I
do, it gave me great pleasure to interview the Bay Area Sound Department.
The Bay Area Sound Department (BASD)
provides music, sound and
voice production for top-tier video game titles. Indiana Jones and the
Emperor’s Tomb composer
Clint Bajakian teamed up
with sound designer Julian Kwasneski (who is currently working on several big
titles, including Starcraft: Ghost) to create the BASD three years ago. Since
that time, the production company has evolved into one of the most prestigious
sound development studios around.
What are the advantages and disadvantages to
composing game music, compared to others?
Clint Bajakian:
The main advantage of composing game music is that game music is interactive:
you never know precisely what the player will do, so you never know precisely
how your music will sound! The main disadvantage of composing game music is that
game music interactive: you never know precisely what he player will do, so you
never know precisely how your music will sound! If you compose for games, you
have to deal with all of the challenges, all of the frustrations, and all of the
rewards of struggling with interactivity.
How did you come up with the
sound effects for Knights of the Old Republic?
Julian Kwasneski:
The game takes place four thousand of years before rise of the Empire we all
know from the Star Wars films so we needed to create sounds that evoked the
distant past of the Star Wars universe, familiar but new. We achieved this by
combining our own recordings of every day real-world sounds with effects from
the Star Wars sound library. For instance, we wanted the sound of the Ebon Hawk
to have the classic Millennium Falcon sound while still conveying that it is a
larger and older vehicle. To create its sound, we started with the Millennium
Falcon source effects and then layered them with other recordings we made such
as Trans Ams pass-bys, motorcycles and old Land Rover V8s.
How do you usually create sound effects for
a game? Are they mostly generated from a computer?
Julian:
We make all of our effects on the Mac in Pro Tools. This gives us the capability
and flexibility we need to craft what can be very complex effects. We draw upon
a very large online SFX library that has both commercial and custom recordings.
We often record custom material specific to the effect we’re working on which
can really breathe life, presence and uniqueness into a sound. For our work on
Star Wars titles, we have had the added advantage of being able to draw from the
wealth of effects in the Skywalker Sound Star Wars sound library. One of the
myths surrounding sound production on Star Wars games is that all of the sounds
already exist and are there for the picking. While this is true for many of the
sounds, the reality is that the library is often missing the specific instance
of the sound you are looking for. For example, while a certain vehicle may have
only enjoyed a short cameo flying by the camera in one of the films, it may be
the main vehicle in the game you are working on. This means we need to score all
the various actions this vehicle can do—engine idles, take-offs, pass-bys,
starts, stops, etc. All of these sounds need to be formatted in a way that will
work with the game’s engine’s audio capabilities. The ultimate goal is to stay
true to Ben Burtt’s original vision from the films as we extend it into new
territory. Still, there’s a cool feeling you get when you play a lightsaber or
Tie Fighter file and think to yourself, "Ya, that’s it."
When working on a game what is your primary
goal? What is the one thing you want to achieve more than anything else?
Julian:
We want to achieve as immersive and as realistic an experience as the genre
warrants. Technology has made it possible for us to do some really cool things
like multi-channel ambient streams that truly immerse the player in a given
location.
Is Celebrity Deathmatch
using brand-new voice work, voice work from the show, or both?
Clint:
Celebrity Deathmatch did feature the original voice of the celebrities
portrayed, as done in the show. It was a blast working with those and creating
hundreds of wacky sound effects in addition. The character moves and attacks in
the ring involved dozens of interesting props, including chainsaws, robots,
thunder, magic, booze bottles, you name it. They were so specific that we
created original recordings for most of it rather than resorting to our sound
effect library.
Indian Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb featured
a live 72-piece orchestra recording! Is that the largest project BASD has ever
done?
Clint:
The orchestral ensemble for Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb (http://www.lucasarts.com/products/indiana/music.html)
was the largest one I’ve had the pleasure to work with in my professional
career. It’s a great trend of the industry to be working increasingly with live
orchestra and, in some cases, chorus. It benefits literally everyone in the
entire ecological chain of production. The publisher has a better sounding game,
composers are called upon to focus primarily on composition, wonderful musicians
and engineers get more work, and the end user experiences a superior sounding
product. I’m glad to be a part of this fast growing trend and am looking forward
to my next big orchestral project.
How severely do you think
music affects a game?
Clint:
Music has perhaps more power than any single element in making a game dramatic
and immersive. Music in games is what tells a person how he or she should be
feeling, as is the case in film and television music. Above and beyond creating
an appropriate mood, music should be used to enhance the actual situation in the
game. For example, ideally, if a spaceship zooms by the camera, a musical
flourish would be ideal. This is accomplished in games through sophisticated
interactive techniques in which the score is pre-designed in segments to be able
to respond tightly, yet fluidly, to the dramatic twists and turns of game play.
Then there’s overall genre, or idiom. Is the game crying out for orchestral,
techno, rock, or jazz? When a game developer gets all three right, genre, mood
and technical adaptability, the composer is working in an ideal environment to
produce a really special soundtrack – one that greatly enhances the game playing
experience.
Have you found that music and sound effects
(SFX) work in tandem with each other, or are they separate but equally important
aspects of the game?
Clint:
Both options hold true in different circumstances. As is often the case with
such broad categories, SFX and music usually remain fixed as separate entities,
but they do occasionally operate in tandem with each other.
Sound effects, by
definition, are designed to enhance to realism of a game or film environment.
Even the most basic effects can transform a flimsy image into a compelling and
authentic one. The most basic function of SFX, therefore, is to support and
enhance the concrete visual world of a game/film.
Music, on the other hand,
usually serves as more of an emotional guide to the content of the product. The
power of a scene or situation can be infinitely magnified by the addition of an
appropriate score. The ebb and flow of the musical statements usually relate
most directly to the more subjective, human content of the video.
Of course, neither SFX nor
music are in any way bound to these concrete functions, and there is a necessary
amount of crossover between them. In certain circumstances some sound effects
can be "larger than life," and the resulting emotional moment can be
immeasurably heightened. The best sound designers will always argue that the
sound effects follow the emotional content of the video and adjust their
intensities accordingly. Similarly, a good music score will literally track the
action of the scene, punctuating certain moments with sound effect-like hits.
Especially in scenes with intense action, the score often acts like a second SFX
track, punctuating on-screen events with percussive gestures, ascending and
descending scalar motion, etc.
One of the great things
about my job now is that I’ve worked with Julian for over ten years: we have
reached the point where his sound effects dovetail with my music to enhance each
other’s work. We look forward to next year, when we’re collaborating on several
more projects, handling both the music and the sound, as a one-stop-shop for
some exciting new games.
What is it like handling the voice aspect of
a game? I’ve heard Tom Hanks say that he’d be required to say a line 15
different ways before Pixar would be happy with it. Is that what it takes to
achieve good voice work in games?
Julian:
It often does take that much dedication. When we’re recording voice for an
interactive sequence, we rarely have more than one actor in the studio at the
same time. The director’s burden is to ensure that dialogue flows between
characters-it has to sound great not just on its own, but also along with the
other lines in the script, including lines that may not have been recorded yet.
Star Wars: Knights of the
Old Republic, one of our latest projects, had 16,000 lines of dialogue which was
a challenge in itself. Each of these lines needed post-production attention and
we had over 40 unique creative processes spread over all of the characters. The
entire voice set then needed to be localized for both French and German, each of
these languages requiring new tweaks to make them sound right. We’ve honed
incredibly effective tracking mechanisms for ensuring that all of this
processing is consistent. We also worked hard to master the file set and
achieved volume consistency across all 16,000 files. We’ve probably heard each
file at least 4 times. Do the math.
Under the credits listing on your Official
Site, it mentions that BASD has done the sound for Emotional Rollercoaster,
which is apparently a music video. Could you elaborate on that?
Julian:
That was a video for Vivian Green’s "Emotional Rollercoaster." The beginning of
the video shows footage outside a club. They needed ambient sound—the classic
city sounds along with one of her other tunes that needed to sound like it was
playing from inside the club. Of course, once the video starts, it’s all music
and our job was done.
Can you divulge any details on your work in
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King?
Julian:
We worked on several of the cinematic sequences with EA, both pre-rendered and
in-game. We were privileged to be able to work with the sound effects from the
movies, which we then combined with our own recordings to make the sounds that
were unique to this game.
How did you promote yourself to game
developers and publishers? How did you make sure that they knew BASD existed?
Clint:
It sounds simple, but the most important promotional piece we can do is doing
the best job we can on each of our products. We work as closely as possible with
the game producers, mining them for information about the game’s background, the
designers’ vision, and the project so far: We want to completely remove their
worry about sound design, allowing them to concentrate on the hundreds of other
aspects of game development. If we can do that, they’ll want to work with us
again.
Is there a limit to how many
titles BASD will take on at a time?
Julian:
Each project is unique, so there’s not a hard and fast number. Some projects are
more straight-forward where others can be quite tricky and time-consuming. Both
Clint and I keep a very strong hand in every project we direct: but in the end
we are a team and work as such. One day might have me out recording diesel
tractors and another have me cutting footsteps. It’s all about what’s best for
the project at that given time. Our efficiency has been dramatically increased
due to several internal systems and tracking tools we have developed. It also
doesn’t hurt to have great personnel like Jared and Nathan on board as well as a
few tricks we’ve picked up over the years.
What is the most challenging sound (music,
voice or sound effect) request you’ve ever received? Which one would you say is
the most unusual?
Julian:
Every game has a certain set of unusual requests. Typically, the harder ones are
the larger-than-life occurrences—a starship the size of a small city crashing
into an asteroid, or a ship with hundreds of laser guns causing mass destruction
on a planet—or sounds of things that don’t actually exist, like a magic spell
and many science-fiction sounds. They’re often the most difficult sounds, but
they also call upon our creativity the most, so we enjoy working on them.
With the next generation of game consoles
and the ongoing evolution of PC gaming, do you feel that creating sound for
games will become more or less complex?
Julian:
Although the tools for making sound effects are proliferating and becoming more
accessible, this brings with it new responsibilities that were not originally on
a sound designer’s plate, especially regarding sound implementation and sound
programming and interactivity. Of course this is exciting as it allows us to
extend into areas in which we always wanted to be tinkering.
Is there anything about the sound in video
game that bothers you? Is there anything you’d like to change?
Julian:
In specific games, I think it’s a shame when a given soundtrack doesn’t try to
go the extra mile to make it sound great-when they use standard library sounds,
when they don’t do even the most simple tricks to make the sound great, or when
the sounds don’t challenge our expectations. It’s no secret these days that
gamers are paying attention to audio and have come to expect a certain level of
quality. Most any decent game review will address the sound and music on levels
that were unheard of 5 years ago.
The industry itself is
growing up. It has taken big strides, but has far to go, too. I do hope that in
this process, we develop a more sane and professional process for creating
realistic schedules. Of course we can always be more efficient, and we can
manage our projects more carefully. It’s important to keep things moving….
Well said.
Thank you for your time.
For more information on the Bay Area Sound Department,
visit their Official Web Site at:
www.basound.com
