This week I finished up a lot of the materials I needed to get done for our project. I finished all the functionality for both the menu and Credits scene. I put a nice skybox on both of them so that they look pleasing to the eye. I then created some ambient music for the menu scene. The biggest challenge I had was getting the controller pointers to work in the Credits scene. For some reason when I copied them over from the Main Menu scene they stopped working. After a couple headaches and a bit of adjustment we were able top get the controllers working properly once again. For the background ambiance I found some good spooky orchestrations and combined that with wind, chimes, and heartbeats to create a thoroughly creepy atmosphere. Next week I will: -Assist our programmer in anyway possible to implement the assets I've created -Create more audio assets for the game
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It has been a short while since the last show of Dead Man's Cell Phone ended and I wanted to talk about what I learned during the process of creating the sound for this show. While I think I did much better during this show than when I did Anne Frank there are certainly still stuff I could improve on. So let's cut to the chase and talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of Dead Man's Cell Phone sound design.
First let's talk about some of the things I improved on from my last time doing sound for a show. I was much more organized this time. I kept everything I was working on in one centralized folder which I mirrored in an updated google drive folder. This meant I spent a lot less long looking for assets and could instead work on what I needed to do. My teammates could also find the work I had done easier as well as add there contributions to a place where I could find them. My editing skills have also gotten better over the past year. This time I had to edit an entire song to be filled with voicemails and phone sounds. I was able to do this quickly and easily the first time. This song was also set to choreography which i was able to time some of the sounds within the song to. There are of course things I should still work on. Setting up the speaker system involved a lot of trouble. We couldn't get sound at first and once we got sound it only came out through a certain model of speakers. What this came down to was simply the unfamiliarity of the hardware we used to me. I needed to do more research on the sound system we were using so I could more effectively create a working speaker array on the first try. All in all the show went well. I'm looking forward to doing more sound design in the future and continuing to get more familiar with setting up the actual speakers and running the sound board. In the blog post: -Debrief from Dead Man's Cell Phone -Better organization -Better Editing -One thing I should work on for the future This week I mostly worked on finishing up the sound cues for Dead Man's Cell Phone. With the tech rehearsal for the production coming up next week I wanted to spend one last full week devoting all my attention to it. I spent my time researching songs that the director specifically asked for. One example of a song is the music that plays in the background of the Friday night dinners in Gilmore Girls. This cue was particularly hard to find as I had to search multiple forums for one that had a reference to the song. Even then I only got that the song was written by Mozart and went into the music credits for an episode to find the exact song that played. Other sounds I found were mostly noir songs on YouTube and options for a washing machine noise to play in the background during hell.
Next Week I will: -Finish any last minute Dead Man's Cell Phone Cues -Start working on more chicken animations This week not much happened in game design. We only had two days of school, one of which was cut short due to snow. However I did get a couple things done in the way of sound design and Dead Man's Cell Phone. My director chose a song to go in the background of the cell phone ballet cue and now I'm working on the final version. What I've found is that I need a ton more voicemails from the cast and the crew to fill all the space I have left in the cue. I've decided that I'll make do with what I have for now and add in more voicemails as they slowly trickle in.
Next week I will: -Finish up some Dead Man's Cell Phone cues before break -Maybe start a new chicken animation if I feel ready to brave 3ds Max again and have time A new year of theatre shows is upon us at DSA. While I decided to sit out on doing sound for our first show, Godspell, I'm back to work on our next production of Dead Man's Cell Phone. This is a play by Sarah Ruhl that explores human connection and how technology both connects and isolates us. For this play our director wants it to have a distinct noir-mystery feel. We plan to incorporate this in our sound design by using smooth noir-jazz during transitions. I started doing research on the kind of music we could use and found a lot of good royalty-free music online that our sound screw could use in the show. The noir music clashes with harsh technological sounds throughout the script. There are a lot of phone rings that are used throughout the course of the play. To find the best phone ring to use I started by asking my director what her idea was on how the ring should sound. She envisioned something like the original blackberry ringtone. Going off of this i found several possible blackberry ringtones. However, what I realized is that to set this play in the modern times many of these ringtones are outdated and not easily recognizable as a phone. To solve this, I shifted my focus to I phone ringtones. My director liked the idea of having a more recognizable ringtone and in the end we settle on two versions to try out later in the blocking rehearsals. I'm very excited to be working on another theatre production. I had a great time designing sound effects for Anne Frank and while I didn't do everything perfectly in my first show, I'm looking forward to continually improving my skills as a sound designer. -What is Dea Man's Cell Phone? -What I'm doing for Dead Man's Cell Phone -What I'm excited about going into this production It's a new year and as promised my teammates and I have just gotten started on our VR game project. Already its clear that nothing will be easy in this. So far I'm pretty sure the hardest part is going to be getting all the pieces of code to work. We've hit a couple of errors so far and it seems like the code changes from computer to computer. This makes me suspect that when we get all our assets together we should leave a lot of time to bring everything together.
My main focus on this project is the audio. This week I've been creating what amounts to my rough draft of sounds and trying to decide what i want the overall feel of the game's soundscape to be. Obviously since it's a horror game it needs to be spooky. With one google search though you can see just how big of a genre this actually is. Since our game is set in a school but we use a lot of technology (phones, flash drives, computers, etc.) as key game items. Therefore I decided to have a more generically creepy background sound. To do this I used the sound of rushing wind from what could be a loud AC duct. However to make it a little creeper I make it come in and out in almost a breath-like sound. For the other sounds I decided each area could have it's own creepy ambiances that fade in and out at random. For example in the atrium I have a babbles of voices that starts at a whisper, grows in volume then cuts out suddenly. In the following week I'm hoping to: -Finish all sound drafts -Help with measurements -Continue testing and debugging the VR code and rig Recently I have been spending a lot of time working in Adobe Audition making sounds for the DSA Troope 5765 production of the Diary of Anne Frank. Previously I hadn't done any audio editing for anything other than videos or games so having to make something that would play in the real world posed a number of new and interesting challenges for me to overcome.
The first major challenge I faced was that things that sound good over headphones don't always sound great once you pipe them out through a sound board. This was especially hard because the sound board we have in the theatre right now can only play mono sound. This meant that whenever I made a sound I had to make sure it wasn't stereo or run it through a Mono Bus in Audition so you could hear both sides. This worked a lot of the time but some sounds I found simply didn't work without a stereo effect. This meant I had to look for new options and make sure each sound worked. Another problem I had was finding sounds. I set a goal for myself in this show to use no copyrighted material that we didn't own. This cut off stealing sounds from youtube and other video cites. There are so many unique sounds I needed to find, I often had to spend hours trying to find multiple options of sounds to show the director. Despite all these hardships I actually had a lot of fun working on this show. I got to express myself creatively in new ways and I was allowed to think outside of the box on how to make certain things. Hopefully I'll get to work on even more shows in the future and perfect my sound design skills. Last week we finished up our first semester in Advanced Game Design and oh boy what a semester it has been. The biggest thing that stood out to me this semester is how many new tools I've learned. Last year in Game Design we mostly focused on strengthening our grasp over our old skills. We mostly worked in programs we had already used such as Photoshop and 3ds Max. This year has been the complete opposite. We did our usual 2-3 infographics in Photoshop to kick off the year but past that (and our large Unity game project in the first quarter) we have focused on new programs. This quarter in particular we focused on learning AV techniques using Audition and Premiere. This has taken me out of my comfort zone a couple of times already this year but has been extremely fun. I love learning new skills that expand what I can do creatively on a computer and what we've done so far has certainly put a big check mark in that box.
So out of the new skills I've gained what have been my biggest takeaways? AV tools take time to make a good looking final product. Much like making a video game in Unity ther's just no way to get around the fact that in order to make a good video or sound you need time. Sure knowing your way around the program can help speed up the process but videos and sounds require lots of tweaking to get perfect. Even with a story board and clips, once you import them into Premiere you will need patience to slowly craft your perfect video. Clips will need to be edited. Sounds will need to be synced. transtions will need to be added, watched, and adjusted according to the material you need to present in a given time. Everything takes patience and creativity to work. That said once to put time into a video or sound it will be good. You can very easily make something that looks good from nearly anything if you have enough patience. Going into the next semester I look forward to bringing these new skills as well as the patience to use them with me. One thing I ran across while editing audio recently was my real lack of knowledge in what certain effects actually do to the audio. Effects such as "Echo" and "Delay" sound simple in theory but when you apply them to your base audio they can be hard to control. When you add an effect in Audition, the program pulls up a comprehensive sound board of adjustments you can make. While these controls give you a lot of power over the effect, if you don't know what things do things are bound to get messy.
For the purposes of this post we'll be diving deeper into Delay and Echo effects. First up is the three different kinds of effects that fit into this category: Delay, Analog Delay, and Echo. Echo effects are basically what they sound like. It creates a series of decaying echoes to a sound much like what you would hear at the Grand Canyon. By adjusting things like the Delay Time Units and Successive Echo Equalization, you can make a sound die out quickly or make it seem like the sound originates in a large room. You can even make a sound jump back and forth from side to side with Lock Left & Right. Delay effects are different from Echoes in that they are more controlled. Delays will only occur a specified number of times. They can fade into nothing, or ramp up into huge sounds using feedback. They can also be used to create more subtle echoes. With Analog Delays you can also distort the sound for different types of effects that mimic vintage delay units. Studying these effects and what they do has already seriously increased my understanding of audio effects. Where there was once rows of meaningless toggles and numbers I now am beginning to understand how to create amazing audio effects. This past week in advanced game design we’ve focused on audio editing in adobe audition. This has been an entirely new experience for me since I’ve never done audio editing before. So far, everything has been very intuitive for me. I’ve enjoyed editing sound clips to make cool sounds and creating radio commercials out of raw voiceovers. But what is it like to be a real sound designer vs. a game designer. Is this a career path I want to take.
Well to start off with the average salary of a sound designer is about $9,000 less than that of the average game designer (according to payscale.com). While not everything should be decided on money that’s admittedly not a good start to the dream of being a sound designer. However, there are some good things about working in sound. For one, sound design branches into many more fields than game design. This would give me the liberty to live in more places than a game designer can choose from. It also means that I would have more jobs to choose from. I could work in the theatre industry, for example, or even for the radio. That is the biggest advantage of sound design. It gives me the opportunity to explore a bit more and wouldn’t trap me in one industry. -weekly update -sound design vs. game design |
AuthorSamuel Henry is a Senior at DSA in NC. He has 3 years of prior experience in the game design pathway and he's looking forward to becoming a great game designer. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools Categories
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