An Epic Journey through the Audio Universe that is 'Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy'

[Music] thank you hi everybody thanks for joining me I'm here in Montreal Canada I hope everybody's doing well over there so yeah let's get started I'm going to take you through an Epic Journey Through the audio universe that is Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy so let's Dive Right In so introduction first uh I'm Steve schipkowski and if you're wondering the last name is pronounced shepkowski and there won't be a test you can not worry about it so moving forward I've been an audio director in the video game industry for the last 20 years and I've been the senior audio director with idos Montreal for the last 15 years and basically uh some of the titles that I've shipped would be um Human Revolution Deus Ex Deus Ex mankind divided the live breach mode

that we had and all the DLCs as well as promotional material so another interesting thing to note is I've been a performing rock musician for the last 30 years and if you need some proof of that well here I am in all my spray net 80s Glory here I am in the 90s trying to look as angst and grunge-worthy as possible and here I am today so this will conclude the comedy portion of the presentation in case you were wondering and the last thing I'm going to mention is as a kid I grew up on a healthy diet of comic books Marvel books Stephen King books big reader loved horror and science fiction and a healthy dose of rock and roll so all of these passions prepared me for my role as the senior audio director on Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy so we got some destinations today on our journey pre-production we're going to take an

Overlook at the steps we took to scope the game and Define our vision and to get the right pieces in place we're going to look at production and how we managed to get everything we wanted in and a few extras and finally the closing and the mix a look at the climactic finale to our journey so our Journey Begins a few years ago so in pre-production we asked a lot of questions so starting with what we needed to have once this phase would be finished so we things we needed to have and be ready for as we stepped into production so of course we were going to need a composer we're going to need a music licensing partner because I knew I wanted to have licensed music in this uh in this game we're going to need a solid sound design plan because this was going to be bigger and different than anything I had ever done and X factors which I'll get to in a little bit so questions for the composer what do we want as a score well I knew we wanted a

big epic orchestrated score it had to feel Marvel I wanted the feeling of a Saturday matinee when you and your friends were sitting there waiting for something like Star Wars to begin and when the lights went down and you all started throwing popcorn at the screen and yelling that feeling of excitement almost like a roller coaster about to take off musically this would be a huge undertaking there was going to be massive deliverables recording a full Orchestra it was something I had never done so I was going to need to rely on the composer quite a bit which brings me to my next point it was going to need to be a lot of trust between us and ultimately creatively someone I could mesh with so I needed to answer all these questions and thankfully one man checked off all those boxes and that magical man was Mr Richard Jakes uh for those of you who don't know this is some of Richard's credentials and if there are any James Bond fans out there who haven't played or listened to the score from Bloodstone I highly recommend it it

was very impressive and it showed me what Richard could do and it gave me a lot of confidence moving forward so the budget for this game was originally for four hours of music recording the game grew and at one point I told production look we need to add at least another hour of music and recording time or it's not going to be enough thankfully I had a great production team that trusted me and listened to me and we did make the decision to go ahead and it was the right one we completed the game with just over five hours of scored music all recorded at Abbey Road Studios which I'll get to in a bit and just so you know there was close to six hours of cinematics in the game we would need to be creative on how to cover all this and of course when I say six hours it's not a true number because we have a lot of branching dialogues but it's still way over the original estimate um so it was fine but we would need to keep that in mind as we went forward so one thing I really wanted to focus on with the music was musical pillars and one of them with themes and when I asked for the pitch to the composers I made a

very strong push saying I wanted to hear themes if you were going to give me something like a a main theme well I wanted to hear variations of it because I wanted that to be present in the game unknowingly this would help me quite a bit as it allowed me to reuse music over the course of the game which is a term known as late motif some of the themes we focused on were lost in grief which was a huge theme in our game uh Nova core which we gave like their own military theme lady hellbender who had a huge chapter devoted to herself plus we visited her Planet so she definitely warranted her own theme The Universal Church of Truth and raker who was our antagonist the Magus which we came up with a very cool sound design effect that we always used when it was involving the nagus or the promise and the most importantly the Hero theme which was our main guardian's theme which you'll hear a little in a little bit with our composer so now jumping to one of the next pillars we were talking about in

pre-prod was the licensed music so this game's music would be 80s bass that was something we had decided so the questions came again what songs would we need or want what styles do we want so I did a big exploration thankfully I had a huge knowledge of the 80s music already um and the conclusion we came to was sort of rock pop and New Wave worked the best we tried almost everything but that seemed to be the right recipe now how many songs can we afford to have in the game how will we use them all how can we maximize our return on this meaning the money that we were shelling out for all this you definitely want to make sure you're hearing the song and using it as much as you can and not just using it for like 10 seconds most importantly who's going to take care of the legal side of obtaining these songs and clearing all the uses I mean I had a good knowledge in publishing and being in a musician for the last 30 years but this was beyond anything I had ever done so thankfully I hooked up with this gentleman here Randy Eckhart from

Eckhart Consulting uh Randy worked on a lot of the early EA Games and the Guitar Hero franchise games he came highly recommended through a trusted um a trusted friend and and peer in the industry and he had contacts both with legal and with the labels which I knew was a bonus right off the bat plus he had advice on how we should proceed forward using terms that would work for all the Marquee artists as well as us so we started with a list of about 50 songs that we explored and just kept shaving the list down and adding to it I still didn't know all the ways I would use licensed music just that the IP needed it so I continued exploring and just messing around with music and as I played with the licensed music and I was looking for ways to make the most of the songs and the money we were spending it just it hit me all the more that I really needed to find a good way to use all this like we were we were investing quite a bit of money into the licensed music side and I wanted to make

sure we got back a great return on it so I'm going to circle back to this topic it's going to be a theme that I I hit a few times so now looking at the sound design we looked at identifying some of the most important sounds we were going to hear in the game over and over again Star Lord's Elemental Blaster was at the top of the list it's where we put the most efforts the rate of fire the volume sitting in the mix the stereo feel we wanted of the guns the Milano and the hyper speed transition was another very important one uh that we knew we'd hear a lot in the game star-lord's visor effect which we definitely wanted a a difference in the environment we played with cutting ambiences out adding reverbs and I think we found a cool recipe for when the visor went on and it wasn't too annoying Combat special attacks there was a lot of special attacks from the Guardians we were going to have to treat all of these as well and finally all the aliens and creatures in our game so looking at that last subject this was a huge subject for me

um we I knew one of the maps we were visiting in the game was nowhere and I wanted that that credible Star Wars feeling um to anywhere we had aliens in the game I just felt Star-Lord Star Wars was the bar we were aiming for I did a focus group test with some local actors who I knew could do like some really interesting weird voices but it wasn't right and I knew it it still felt a bit too cartoony and Saturday morning animation driven and it wasn't really right so how was I going to create what I had in my head well thankfully the universe delivered to me the monster Factory or the fabric the most and what this is is it's a local troop made of death metal singers that actually has uh singers they're based here but they have singers all over the world and these are people that can do very uh aggressive things with their voices that normal actors probably wouldn't want to do so it was a very uh interesting concept to me so I met with their head monster which was Sebastian he's the head of the

company and we would meet weekly and discuss ideas and see if there was a good creative fit so I told him I wanted nowhere in the game to feel authentic and Rich using the Star Wars Cantina as seen as the reference and we would spend a lot of time talking and pitching ideas um we would also we decided we would need alien languages to be created as well as creature Source sounds so it wasn't just getting actors who could get in front of the the mic and do something really cool it was going to actually need because we had races of of aliens we needed to be more consistent and actually have languages created so this was going to be a huge huge amount of work however we spent six months to a year just crafting our design through film references and test recordings and created a giant reference Bible to support narrative we had to make some languages English but we still tried to make them sound alien I didn't want to

cheapen out and just give them like some British or exotic accent and be like well there you go we said no let's try and keep it alien and I'll show you some examples as we go forward and we would have to lock into design for every creature during production and start thinking about getting it all recorded casting the actors to support the design so how this happened was uh during all those weekly meetings and reference Bible talks Sebastian would send me uh demos that he would do himself like for this creature how about this and the ones that I liked we would lock it in saying okay that's the design and then he would look in his troop of of singers and performers for people who could do that voice that was needed and by doing so we eventually found all our actors that would fill out our cast so this is just to show you a bit of the tracking that I did these are some of the the aliens that appear this is a creature these are some of the races and you'll see all these little write-ups basically I created on my own to help

set because when creating the languages I mean the guy's really intelligent he wanted to know well is this a warring race because if it is it's going to be very strict on hard consonants and like these big sort of things and if they were a peaceful race it would have a completely different language approach so that was great for him and for me I needed to track like where they're going to need facial recording if it was facial well the union here says you have to do x amount of hours so then I have to fill that recording time with enough content for them to record so this was all a lot of tracking for me but it showed you you know I had line counts uh whether they needed face cam just voice cam it was it was very complex so let's jump to the X factors okay and I'm going to tell you what my X factors were so the definition of variable in any given situation that could have the most significant impact on the outcome what I'm meaning about X factors is I was looking for audio X factors I knew this game lent itself well to audio and

I wanted to take it full advantage of that so looking for X factors we found a few one being the Star-Lord album one being the Jukebox inside the Milano the huddle a feature in our game and the Milano uh sorry the main menu in our game so now let's take a look at these so starting with the Star-Lord band this is the album cover of the album we've made uh the concept was that Peter Quill took the name of Star-Lord because he grew up worshiping a band from the 80s called Star-Lord I thought it was a brilliant concept and it was another way that we were able to sort of make this Guardians our own version as compared to the MCU so could we write and record the actual album and make it available in the game I mean I definitely wanted to but I had no idea if I'd be able to pull this off so how would I pull this off see I'm getting ahead of the slides now how would I pull this off well that's a great question I thought a lot about it and I would need to partner with

somebody so I partnered with Joanne Boudreau who's the head of his own company al-shamic audio Joanne buduro is a friend of mine he's also an amazing musician but he's also uh the mixer for all of our trailers and any of our promotional stuff for Guardians as well as past projects and he's been a recording engineer that we use for all our mocap recordings and all our vo recording so we have a great history together so we wrote and recorded space writers the song off the album as our first demo because we needed to do a proof of concept uh could we you know could we do this and uh for those of you who don't know the story uh basically I presented the song to our creative director without telling him it was me singing it my intent was always to find another singer who would who would come in and do the singing um but our creative director heard it and he was like who's singing and I said it was me and he was like really it's you and he's like okay you're gonna be the singer so inside I was super excited

as a guy who's been playing in bands all my life I couldn't believe I was going to have this opportunity so our next step was for me to sit down with JF and go well what are we going to write about because obviously I can't make this like you know a Motley Crew record about you know strippers and stuff and weird things that don't fit into this this universe and he was like no we're gonna focus on you know believing in yourself family overcoming the odds grief these were the themes of our game so we wrote all the songs around that the album was written and recorded in about two and a half years so now jumping to the huddle design had a great concept for like a Hail Mary type speech when things were going bad that would give the team a boost uh when you needed it so it was a it was a great concept a great idea and uh looking for ways to get more use out of our licensed songs that point that I said I wanted to keep coming back to I tried putting the songs underneath some footage one day that I'd captured of combat and I just brought it into the DAW and I killed the score that

was under it and I just brought in some license track and I was like huh that's pretty cool having this after the payoff you know like having after the speech but here's what we had I want you to see it in its original form without the payoff at the end and this will focus more on the speech part the first part [Applause] [Music] I cannot fight beside you any longer rodent your battle skills are sloppy and erratic my skills you've got all the subtlety of a brain dead battering say the word Peter quote and I shall see you handedly tear these fiends apart whoa whoa whoa guys these insults you keep tossing around are we a team or should we just throw each other's lives away because the only thing that matters here is that we knock them out together who's with me

there you go so pretty cool but we love the vibe but honestly we felt we were losing the pacing a bit coming out of combat it sometimes felt a bit jarring and I'll show you what I mean in a little image that I did so basically you would come out of combat and as you saw there would drop down and there's kind of a drone going on in the background and you'd get your speech he'd click the Walkman and the part you haven't seen yet which will we jump back into combat with the license track but it was in this speech part that we felt we were losing people a bit you know like the energy you come out of combat and you're into a speech back into combat it could feel a bit jarring at times so what I proposed um I had this in my head forever and and finally at some point in production I sat down with Richard and I said what what do you think like can we make this better can we score something I don't know maybe Anthem Stadium like uh you know something a sports you know I was trying to just get a big crowd energy reference

you know and what I showed him was I said instead of dropping down what if we came down you know instead of 100 maybe 65 70 and then ramped back up into combat so it felt like during that whole speech you saw instead of it being so static there would be something Dynamic building here and Richard loved it and he delivered a track to me that I fell in love with and uh and here's the final result I want you to hear it for yourself and it includes the music payoff at the end so this was our huddle feature one of our X factors [Applause] [Music] yes celebrate this moment my friends Victory shall soon be ours we shall carve our name in the history books Peter Quill and it will not be spelled incorrectly [Music] foreign

look I know we want to celebrate because we're maybe two steps away from winning this fight but we start dancing before we actually win these scunt holes will send us to our Graves so let's keep our focus and show these losers exactly how we rock who's with me Victory is always [Applause] [Music] [Applause] this is how it's done [Music] so there you go that's the Huddle how it finished and how it shipped and I was really happy that we were able in my opinion to make it better and more

Dynamic during that that speech part so now looking at a few of the other X factors that I mentioned the Milano jukebox so it seems simple enough but God what a valuable tool to have in our in our box is what an asset to have because um we felt in trying to establish the Milano as the guardian's home in the game you're constantly going on missions and then a lot of times you end up back in the Milano to head somewhere else go and hit a new planet come back to the Milano Etc so in trying to establish the Milano as the guardian's Home music could help a lot like for me as a musician obviously here in my house there's always music playing in one room or the other this music always going in the house so a great way to sort of sell the the concept that the Milano is their home is to have music available all the time um the other great thing was it gave us the ability to Muse use music to help set the mood to the guardian's current Vibe and have it stage important conversations as we couldn't score everything it was just too big of a game

so this became a great tool and again hitting that point that I made about maximizing um the the payback that we were paying out for all this music I wanted to use it as much as possible so this gave us a great tool that you know we could if they came from a planet and they were in a tense sort of argument amongst themselves well we would put on a song that would reflect that Vibe and it worked really well the other thing that it also did is the lice using the use of licensed music it helps us to make our characters feel much more human because despite their alien Origins it helps establish a common ground between the games cast and its players so you know having Drax or Gamora or a rocket you know or even Groot comment and reference you know one of the licensed tracks that it was either playing in in the Milano or something it it it made it easier for the player to bond with these characters who did have a very alien background so again you know it was a great uh win on

many fronts so let's have a quick look at the uh the Jukebox it's the monster of course lady hellbender is a legendary Warrior and a noble Queen and she's Rich that is not a prowess simply a commercial fact as long as she buys her monster she doesn't need to be royalty you are jealous of her status so there you go what was great was it was interactive so the player could uh the player could pick and choose songs as they walked around the Milano which was great it was a really really good X Factor that we found so staying on that topic the main menu someone at one point early on in production showed me the static image and there was something about it I just fell in love with I loved the fact that Peter was sitting there with his Walkman and it triggered an idea so I was like instead of normal menu music because I didn't even know what I would

use as a menu music because we were going very classic uh score and it didn't seem like it would fit in the opening I was like what if we somehow use this to showcase our licensed music so I took this image I brought it into my Daw I stretched it out to about a minute and then I just started grabbing Snippets of our license tracks and putting fast forward and Rewind sounds in between them basically just trying to emulate Star-Lord sitting there and scrolling through his Walkman as if he was looking for a certain song so um at one point creative saw it and they just fell in love with it and they came back and they said listen we're going to run with it we're going to animate it all and it's going to look great so you know put it on your list as as songs to clear and make sure we're good for the the usage so here it is uh as as it shipped like this strong black and white day and night

Don't You Wanna Be Free [Music] so very simple concept but very effective and it fit with the brand and the IP and again I was happy to find another angle to push the music out front so now we finished our first destination we're going into our second one production it's happening it's real and and everything's now happening and it's time to rock and roll so to give you an update on all those pillars we just looked at the licensed music things were moving at light speed um we began to narrow down our song list and lock down the songs contractually via Randy Eckhart and our legal department I began using the Huddle as my testing ground for any licensed songs we were going to bring in or so or you know lock down contractually so they had to work in the Huddle otherwise I wasn't interested in in using them and I started looking at using the

licensed music in cinematics as well mainly transitional ones to help balance the scoring budget because I was always keeping a very uh sharp eye an accountant's eye on the minutes we were using and I'll show you that in a few slides so every idea we had whether it was the Jukebox the main menu the Huddle they all had to be legally cleared so every time I had one of these new ideas it just meant that I was at making the game better but making my headaches bigger because I'd have to go back to Randy and go okay I want to use all the music like this go and make sure it's all cleared and this is hence why Randy and I were working together for quite a while because it took quite a while to get everything cleared but we managed to get uh clearance for everything which was great and the process I can't tell you was a huge learning experience for me I mean I had a music background so I knew what publishing was and Mechanicals and performance rights but this took it to a whole new level and um I just tried to be a sponge and learn as much as I could from Randy and and

all the the experts I was surrounding myself with so again licensed music we began to spread the licensed music throughout the game and Richard the composer and I had to really focus on all the musical transitions because often we were going to go from a license track to the score or the other way around and we had to keep it seamless it had to be you know you couldn't have anything jarring we had to respect the keys of the music and make sure everything transitioned seamlessly so we use this a lot in the game transitions such as at the end of chapter one you go from Iran by Flock of Seagulls into the score and chapter three is one of my favorites the everyone's a winner into the score because this was the first one we kind of nailed and it was tough because it's a big long scene with the music playing there's timed and untimed choice wheels so you can't just put a linear track there it would never work so we found tricks we found recipes and it took like almost bending time to do this because I was really adamant I wanted the ending

of the scene when he goes let's go sell a monster so we go from positional audio inside the Milano to full stereo outside it worked great but it needed that that ending through many trial and trial and error we did manage to make it work and I'm going to show it to you right now so you can listen to it group buddy first of all thank you and second of all I want you to know we're gonna bust you out of there right after okay all right let's do this let's go sell a monster [Music] seriously flying into that whether parents are tied to the temperament that's not how women work poor weather anyways I'm sure it looks worse than it is

foreign there you go smooth seamless so now touching back on sound uh at our Peak we were nine on the audio team it's not a huge team including myself my technical director and audio programmer so basically six content creators we had 16 chapters and each sound designer had map ownership they were responsible for the map and the Sounds in it as well as the music integration and I now have to focus on completing the creature in Alien designs which was starting their drag and I had to address it so it was now time to record all our casts for the aliens and creatures we needed to gather all the animations and everything so that they could act to their creature NPC we recorded it all in

our mocap studio so that they could actually have freedom to move and get into character so let's have a listen to some of nowhere listen for all the alien voices you're gonna hear anymore [Music] you want them enjoy the wonders of the Emporium [Music] oh no that's too bad kid looks like you lose she was positive that's where the ball was the eyes play tricks sometimes and I can't keep up something tells me it's not my eyes playing tricks I nasty Bob Kevin thanks for the lettuce have

yourself a fun day yeah look into you barely skin and bones moping your way through the market better have a hot bite it'll make you feel better so you hungry or what no thanks I was hoping for a friend of year though never was wonderful smoke it's definitely if you wake up being customer so that was a bit of our uh our Showcase of nowhere and again staying on Aliens and creatures this bad boy was the wendigo one of our big creatures um what's cool about them is they're just very vicious and aggressive but they do yell wendigo for whatever reason but we thought it was really cool so let's have a look at how a great monster death metal singer Source recording can turn into the creature

let's listen so yeah that was that was great having all that Source material was awesome here's another thing I was really proud of and I thought it was interesting we had the world of mine which appears in our game it's a great concept for those of you who don't know it's uh basically all the best and wisest of uh of xandar that becomes part of a collective Consciousness um so what was cool about that is I said okay well if it's a collective conscious can we use male and female voices and kind of run them together in sync now of course this created a few problems for recording it but we managed to just spend a bit of extra time in prep work and I was really happy with how it came out it sounded really cool so let's have a listen

to multiple outposts worlds and systems so there you have it I just really like the concept of having male and female voice constantly interleaving uh into each other and you get one or the other I thought it was interesting so looking again in production the casting I had casted all the secondary character characters in the game myself including designing all of the enemy NPC factions so what that meant was I had to track every secondary character and allocate roles and lines to actors to maximize recording times as well as create the combatant pools how many different voices or actors are needed for these pools same for all the creature pools so here's some of my sheets like you can see I was tracking how many dialog lines they had how many barks they would have and that would give me the answer of how much time we needed plus it allowed me to see who I was reusing because again you know when you have to record someone for two hours to me it's a complete waste of um bad Management in that you

have the actor come in for 15 minutes and you're now paying them for two hours so of course you don't want to sacrifice quality but I made sure that we tried to maximize if we had them for two hours they were recording for at least 90 minutes so giving you an update now on the music side in production I was now syncing with Richard Daly and we would provide him I'd provide him with a full video Chapter uh walkthrough for every chapter in the game I'd also include a word doc that would use timestamps to reference events in the video where I would need music like an establishing shot a stinger cut scenes combat Etc along with my notes for all of this and also included would be an Excel doc with additional info the song naming estimated time lengths and I would give them all the cinematics as separate files so he could work on them separately so here's a bit of an idea of like a chapter eight where we had uh we have a whole sort of branching dialogue bit with the raker so again we have you know limited like there's no time limit Choice wheels and stuff so I created

flow charts to kind of tell show them what I was thinking and then we would discuss it and you know sometimes he would have a better uh alternative to suggest and we would go with that but ultimately it's my job to sort of make it as easy for him to jump in and start scoring and you could see like I would put time stamps with you know if there was notes needed I would give them the notes and I would have an Excel sheet that would have the same time stamps as the word doc uh if we had old naming that late was like laying around and it was Legacy because the game expanded and you know we get new script names we would have the new names here we would track it here what type of use it was the time and just to show you chapter eight one of the biggest chapters had 90 music entries now again a lot of this is combat into combat but every piece of music had to be tracked and this number here is uh always what scared me I knew we had 16 chapters so roughly about 18 minutes per chapter so anytime I saw this it kept me up at night because I

knew I had to pay back that debt somewhere down the game so part of the fun and stress so again sticking with music we also needed a 10 minute June E3 gameplay demo to be planned out and recorded back in early 2021. so for that we knew we weren't planning on recording the the final score until the end of June so what we did is we recorded a small Ensemble we uh took all the music that was going to be in the demo and we did a hybrid of midi and live instruments with the live instruments mixed more out front so it felt more dynamic um we needed to have all the game music composed by mid-june as the recordings that Abby Road were booked for the last two weeks of June and July would be Richard mixing the recordings with Jake Jackson into 7.1 and quad mixes the deadline for all these deliveries was August 1st so just the last thing to show you how busy we were it was crazy but we even found time every now and then you just have to sort of make room for something uh at the request of one of the writers

she asked if we could write this catathian war song for Drax and the Guardians to sing she just gave us katathione lyrics and we ran with it and I said to Richard I don't know something stoic and I gave him like the old Soviet Union uh Anthem as my reference and here's what we came up with [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] come on pretty funny so there you go so I'm now going to welcome Richard Jakes to share some of his insights and let him take you through some of the stuff that he was doing Richard thanks a lot Steve and hello everyone I'm going to talk a little bit about the score for the game so as previously mentioned we wanted to utilize light Motif throughout the school to represent the various characters and narrative

settings of the game and the First theme I wrote was for the Guardians themselves which we simply called The Hero theme this thing creates a sense of exploration throughout the Galaxy but also a sense of heroism and not taking itself too seriously as you would expect from these bunch of Misfits so let's have a listen to the main theme now which is in MIDI format uh created in my studio using virtual instruments foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] as well as all the themes in the game I wanted to use underscore especially for when the player is traversing or exploring new areas so here's an example

of that in the forest of second off 9 where we also use scripted events like something big moved through here yay see anything with blood besides of tracks let me know I thought we already had our monster what's he tracking this thing nowhere is a particular section of the game that the player will visit and in this level there are loads of bars and clubs and various alien life forms so we wanted to bring that to life through music foreign [Music] so you want us to bring them back here enjoy

commemorate your visit with a unique souvenir [Music] [Music] during the puzzle section of the game the player will use star-lord's visor to help solve the puzzle and look around the environments musically I wanted to do something different here so when you're not using the visor the Music is More organic and orchestral but when you're in the visor it's more electronic and we blend between stems seamlessly here perhaps the Nova killer knows how to redirect these machines she has experience I was an assassin not a saboteur same results either way right looks like the Wall's weak here Drax I need a hole here to reach the grid and you will have one

[Music] light of choice is a big part of the game and there are some sections that are a lot more emotional than others especially with branching dialogue trees the way I scored this was to use a lot of flow charts and diagrams to Aid me in creating the appropriate music for all the branches here's a short example of some of this music and context [Music] foreign [Music] this is the thing you had to do come to the observation deck to look at the rift no I came to honor the memory of my family it died without meaning [Music] I think I know what you mean man my mom with me yeah [Music] she also died for no reason

I just shot her working in the pandemic was never going to be easy but social distancing presented its own set of challenges especially with regards to recording we were not able to have the maximum amount of players in any one room at any one time because we had to have a minimum of two needed distance between them here's an example with the choir where we would normally have around 35 or 40 singers in the room but we were only allowed to 16 in this particular Studio what we had to do was layer them up and multi-track them so if you have a look at this Mike Trout from Abbey Road you can see the social distancing has been taken into account and now let's have a listen to the second part of the choir hearing the first pass as well given the effect of 32 voices [Music] and now let's have a listen to the

Finish queue in game Guardians of the Galaxy once we finish the recordings we knew the mix would be both complex and large due to the number of tracks we've had to record due to social distancing so we recorded in the mix in Pro Tools using three HDX cards and around 700 tracks this is because we were mixing in 7.1 so in each Proto session we had eight 7.1 stems so for example strings brass wind choir and a 7.1 Master track and we also had eight stereos brass wind choir Etc plus a stereo Master using a lot of busing and vcas so in any one pass we could bounce out every single asset for the game that we needed and for the soundtrack at the same time you could

hear the main theme here and have a look through the pro tool session foreign [Music] as well as composing the score I'm also responsible for recording budgeting scheduling and I needed a team of people behind me to assist with these Talos so I had a team of 11 copies who were working in the sibelius preparing the music to take to the studio and I also had an assistant on the project who was invaluable so my advice is always to get a good team of people around you and learn to delegate tasks thanks for watching and I'll hand you back to Steve thank you Richard so closing out production now giving you

a few last bits of information the Star-Lord band the album was completed the last track was written and recorded was Zero to Hero in January 2021 and xero actually replaced space Riders as the opening song So up until that point it was always space Riders the sad thing was is that we now replace the song so we had to change the key of the opening so it meant Richard had to go back and transpose that but you know it's rock and roll uh we also have managed to through Randy connect with rolling stone and get them to lend us um the fonts and everything the to include a Rolling Stone magazine and what was really cool is we actually did a mock interview with one of their writers that you can read and he did a mock review of the album that we provided him so it just shows you like we really went deep in trying to create the lore behind the Star-Lord band and just enrich the experience for the player so now it's the finale our final destination and we're basically going to look at the mix we knew we needed to

surround ourselves with experts for the mix it was a very challenging game to mix there's five main characters who speak and need to be heard at all times there's multiple weapon sound effects from the Guardians as well as from their enemies there's an epic score we want to hear in-game sound effects like Foley explosions Etc as well as important gameplay UI sound effects so that's a lot of stuff that you got to be able to hear all of it clearly um we met with a bunch of post-production facilities but in the end we decided on molinere studios in SoHo UK and it couldn't have been a better choice one of my requests was for them to provide us someone with mix experience to help us because we get to mix a game every four or five years and this was going to be huge um so we were fortunate enough that they paired us with Mr Richard pryke and if you're not familiar with Mr Richard pryke him and his team won an Oscar for mixing Slumdog Millionaire so we were in great company and again I tried to be a

sponge and just learn as much as I could so on August 5th darn with Richard's mixes we left for the UK and our return date was set for Saturday August 28th and on August uh on arrival we had to quarantine for five days because we were still in the midst of the pandemic so five days at the hotel and we had to go through multiple tests the whole time we were there and we released from quarantine on day five but sadly at the end of our day so we were now one day behind on our mixed Journey so we made a schedule to get caught up and we did get cut we did get caught up doing roughly 12 to 14 hour days the game literally found its audio identity in London um there's a huge piece of London that rides with this game as far as I'm concerned the audio landscape came to life all the elements came together I mean I was sitting there in the mix room listening to it and I was hearing it for the first time as I had always imagined it and it was such a great feeling so one thing was we had one map late in

the game that musically it wasn't flowing well it was just the Dynamics weren't there it was too uh there was just too much music playing all the time so JS my technical director and I we made a plan late at night and then on the Sunday I had Rich come over to my hotel and we sat we made the plan he sent over the music within two days we sent it to Montreal basically about six days after we addressed we had a problem we had the new music integrated into the map and it was now Stellar so it just shows you you know like the pace we were keeping so we returned back from London to Montreal exhausted but feeling Victorious we felt we had really delivered the goods so finale back home when we got back home we recorded a video actually for Zero to Hero that you could see on YouTube or wherever the songs from the album became a strong marketing asset used in most of the trailers which was advantageous to the marketing team and currently as a side note the songs have over a million listens on Spotify which as a musician still blows my mind and you know it's something I can't

really grasp uh The Last Mile so when we got back from the UK there was five weeks left when we returned we spent it on playing the game all the time final checks on all areas audio bug fixes as well as adding some small and final polishes I work with marketing and Joan Boudreau to mix it mix and sound design all the trailers for the game during these last months and in the end we delivered five hours of score plus two hours of licensed music plus a 10 song original Rock album totaling over eight hours of music so to me we definitely succeeded in providing a huge bang for our buck for our player um not to mention all the probably about eight alien languages created as well so my closing thoughts this is a quote from an interview I did in the UK that I barely remembered because I was just tired and it was early in the morning and when I read it I was like wow that's really cool you know I can't believe I said that but there couldn't be truer

words spoken when you surround yourself with the right people the confidence kind of outweighs the pressure and that was taken from an nme article and that's right and that's what exactly what I did I mean I'm not gonna lie there was huge pressure to deliver this game but every step of the way I was surrounding myself where I had weaknesses with strengths whether it was Richard Jakes whether it was Randy Eckhart whether it was Johan buduro for the Star-Lord album and and mixes whether it was Sebastian for the monster people surround yourself with experts it's the best and most foolproof way I think to get yourself to the finish line and accomplish your vision take time to experiment and look for ways to push audio more into design we have to be proactive we have to look for ways like I did for those X factors and most importantly be proactive propose ideas don't sit back nobody's going to walk up to anybody's desk and say Hey you know we're waiting for you to come forward with a great idea you have to find these ideas and then try

and sell them to people and that's how you kind of get audio more out of the background and into the Forefront and finally surround yourself with experts I can't stress it enough it's probably what helped me achieve this Vision the most so that's it I want to thank you all for your your time and your patience um on LinkedIn if you want to connect with me it's Steve schipkowski uh on Twitter at Chef rock99 I'd be happy to meet and talk with any of you in fact I'll see if I can set up a small Zoom group for after this if people want to come into a room and hang out and ask some questions or talk I'm happy to do it so I'm happy to take any q a right now if anybody has any questions thank you thank you very much hear about the uh the audio journey and hear it from start to finish I had a question about the uh the recording stems the orchestra recording did you split the orchestra recording it by

strings brass percussion or what was your uh methodology for the stem recording and the reason meaning for implementation purposes or rather mixing purposes um so Richard delivered all the mixes I mean he would have been a better person to give you the final uh how everything was put together but we did ask for 7.1 uh stems so it was basically like the strings the brass the perks and everything I can't remember all of it right now but we went with 7.1 for all the cutscenes and in game was always quad ambiences okay awesome and it's it sounded like I know you mentioned you did uh for the June E3 demo a hybrid orchestration where you're blending virtual and live elements for the final did you end up using any of the uh virtual strings or brass to augment the live recordings or not so for that negative all live all real nothing uh there was nothing midi that went into the final game awesome cool yes thank

you hey Steve how you doing that was uh good interesting information there great thank you yeah in your experience dealing with kind of the legal and Licensing aspect um and all of that knowledge base I'm sure you acquired I had a question on just kind of pertaining to ownership um when you're creating composition original compositions for a game project or really like this the Star-Lord band stuff now you mean not yeah yeah like anything that you actually created not necessarily the yeah the licensed music I mean the ownership stays with the writers and all that but the Star-Lord band was something um uh that basically was part of the game delivery so you know Disney I was able to keep uh writing credits and all that but at the end of the day it was part of the game that we delivered to uh Disney Marvel and that's that's pretty much a typical deal for something like that in the gaming industry generally generally yes yeah I would say so no that's perfect I appreciate that you're very

welcome hi thanks so much for the talk um you're very welcome nice to meet you hi I had a question about the trans positions you were talking about between the licensed music and the score like the one absolutely like in the chapter one and you said you guys had to do like a lot of time manipulate no so actually what it was it would that example was just for the one that I showed you for the uh the hot chocolate and because it was a long scene with like I said there's at least three or four Choice Wheels in that scene so how do you like when you know you want to get the ending on that how do you get to that ending where the train trip to here is going to change every time so we had to get really creative and and we did find obviously using Loops in specific places and then bringing in the layer of just that and then cut the stereo we brought that in over the loop on a beat so there's a

lot of cheating going on but it actually sounds pretty seamless when you hear it did you guys for like a lot of the line says the music did you receive like any stems of them no manipulate just Street okay now straight straight tracks and then uh you know obviously we had to respect all the legal stuff of you know manipulating songs it gets tricky on what you can do like you can't start read arranging the song where it starts with a chorus and a vert you know what I mean so we had to still be careful it wasn't like carte blanche do whatever you want but we respected the song and it was just about making smart decisions like when it went into the music break it's a long break so you're able to kind of go oh well there's a break here we're not changing the structure of the song We're actually just extending the break for let's say 64 bars instead of 16. you know what I mean so just finding smart places where we could cheat and then like I said the ending part that that

punch that takes you to the stereo was actually a separate stem that we created that we just brought in over beat at the right time if you listen to it isolated you can kind of hear where it jerks a bit but in the context of the game when you're listening to the dialogue it's seamless and and like I was so happy with the result yeah it sounds great thank you thank you so much hi uh what a great story you've been uh telling through thank you for all of this um for the orchestra recording with five hours in it being fresh uh as far as uh uh an ambition yeah what was one of the biggest surprises or if no not a surprise your biggest takeaway from that process so my this might surprise you but as a guy like I said you know like of course I love film scores and John Williams and and you know all the the uh morricone and all the Spaghetti Westerns and all that but what I learned was the power of a live Orchestra I mean I've been to see

like you know Metallica concerts and Motorhead and you know kiss and all these bombastic shows live Orchestra is the true heavy metal as far as I'm concerned like there's there's nothing more powerful than hearing a full orchestra playing some thematic uh piece of music that just I mean for me it's changed how I hear orchestrated music you know I know that would be my biggest takeaway is just realizing how powerful a live Orchestra is because I'd been hearing the midi tracks forever and I and I've never worked with a live Orchestra and I remember being like my bedroom's right above my recording studio I can remember waking up one morning and I'm hearing the orchestra through my pillow and I'm like God I'm listening to this game way too much and then I realized oh no wait I have my Abbey Road stream still running from yesterday and I ran downstairs like with my coffee so I every day I would listen to the orchestra recordings because I couldn't fly down there the covid was really high at the time and I would have had to quarantine for two weeks and I couldn't give up the time so just listen like I

would run down here with a coffee and just sit here and just listen for like three hours to just hear this this to hear the music go from midi to live I hadn't I couldn't believe it as like going from A to B just how impactful it was yeah that's awesome so yeah I learned I learned that thank you you're very welcome I can't really see if there's any other speakers so if there's if but once again I will say that you know this was a huge team effort and you know I get to sort of coordinate the chaos and build the team but without these people I wouldn't be standing here talking to you today for sure so it goes back to my whole surround yourself with experts build an amazing team of people around you you can trust and yeah you'll you'll you'll probably

deliver exactly what you were hoping to deliver [Music]