Next Level Creature Sound Design

good evening ladies and gentlemen and i welcome you to my gdc 2017 talk about next level creature sound design and before i actually start may i remind you to just switch off your phones and maybe put them into a quiet mode of flight mode and i think we are ready to go so first of all i want to give you an overview about what i'm going to talk today so obviously it's about next level creature sound design and first of all i'm going to give you an introduction about myself why am i kind of the right person to talk about creature sound design in the first place i will give you some initial thoughts about creature sound design because i've been doing this for about the last seven years i will also run you through a pre-production the recording process the design process and also briefly about implementation and yeah so myself my name is david phillip and i'm a co-founder of noise works limited in audio audio outsourcing company in london and

i'm also a boom library recorder stem designer and i worked in a large amount of creature heavy titles in my in my past so for example elder scrolls online most of you probably know blade and soul which is an asian game and arcania is a german game again a very creature heavy title and over the last four years or the last two years actually i was leading the creature sound effects production for total war warhammer which you know i think many of you have played and it's a very again a very creature heavy title and i'm very happy to show some insight out of that game and out of the production with you tonight as well right so the initial thoughts i think that's quite important to ask yourself before you start designing creature sounds so i think the first question i ask myself is what's my role as a creature sound designer and i think the best way to put it is to create sound for something a life where you know there's not really a reference in the real world so you can't just go out and have a look at what a creature sounds like that's pretty much impossible and that's a very creative process of

make that you know make sense to the audience or the player the second question is what makes a creature more difficult than other other sound effects it's again a very difficult question in a way but again you know there's no real life reference and that's definitely a tough aspect about the whole thing but we're also highly dependent on on different layers which you know they can be difficult to blend and you know we always have to aim for making a creature sound like one creature not many at the same time and lastly is the difference between producing creatures for interactive and linear media i mean obviously we had you know with gdc so it's all about gaming but you know some of you might actually have to create creature stands for fmvs or cutscenes and so on and i think the actual production what we are going to focus on tonight is actually not that that different and but we're going through through that over the course of the next hour anyway so after these um you know these initial thoughts over the last few years i came up with

personally for me the three ingredients of great creature sound design like almost like a rule book for myself to you know to create the creature sound designs from so the first point which always is very important for me is character so you probably ask us what do you mean by character because people come up to me you know they give me feedback on a creature and say they need much more character they don't have enough character and i you know initially i didn't really know what they meant so character is about how does the creature act what's its characteristics you know is it aggressive is it really stupid now is it highly intelligent and how do how do i perceive its emotions or how does it react how does it uh how does it how does it make me feel as a player and that's everything on a vocal basis obviously then the next point the next very important ingredient is variation so firstly variation in in terms of you know articulations so for example attack sounds death sounds pain sounds idle sounds all that but i think also variation in form of sounds we use

so again during the course of the next hour we're going to look at different recording techniques to keep that variation always uh you know to keep on top of that and then the last ingredient is perspective so you know quite a simple point really but it is really important to ask yourself where does the sound live in our game and in what space you know is it always indoors is it outdoors is it in a cave and so on or is it really close up or very far so do we have to you know we have to take care of that as well and that all comes together in a term which i think is very very important and i will use it and i apologize in advance i will use it a lot tonight which is believability so that's our main aim as a creature sound designer to make something which you just mentioned before which isn't real and which isn't in the real world to make it believable uh for the player and you know that results in immersion as well for the player so in the next video i'm going to show you a few examples of creature sounds which for me stand for believability they just work

and they should get you pumped up for the next hour as well so let's have a listen to that [Music] ah [Music] [Music] yes [Music]

[Music] [Music] see i don't know about you but even the godzilla raw still gives me goosebumps actually just now happen again so this is just really good example of believable creatures you know that you can just feel the size you feel the aggression or the intelligence or whatever a lot of character and a lot of believability right so we can actually start on the the actual process which uh we start with the pre-production and uh pre-production is actually one of the most important aspects in my opinion of creature sound design and i'm guilty myself of you know kind of neglecting that process and because we always as sound designers we kind of want to jump straight in there and actually record a design so it is mostly overlooked and forgotten about but i do think it's very important because we always have to be

aware of what we work on you know we i talked about character before so it's one part obviously but also what universe is it in and you know the characteristics and skills of the creatures we're going to work on we also need to make ourselves aware of what material we want to use so creature sound designs it stands and falls with the with the source we are using so we want to plan that as well one campaign with our colors is just you know we can't create great sounds without great material in the first place and also i think at this point it's very important to mention that if you're freelance or with a developer it doesn't really matter pre-production is always important just that it probably is a bit easier to get the information you need when you're actually employed by someone or in-house let's look at the pre-production like a bit of in an advanced way in terms of creatures and designs so the first thing i would do is i would find out the creature's origin its special characteristics and skills so i mentioned before you know like the for example a creature can be highly intelligent it could be super stupid uh it could be you know uh again it could

be very big it could be very small and it could have special skills like for example a dragon could have a fire breath i need to know about that and um i need to search you look for the dialogue between myself and the design team to find out about the special characteristics of a creature in the first place then i want to know how does it produce sound in the first place you know does it have a does it have a voice box because i've dealt with creatures before who were actually ghostly and before actually reading about this creature wouldn't know how they would actually produce the sound and that's again something which dictates the way i'm working it's a need for language that's a very tricky situation actually to be in and it happened to us in in warhammer because we are creatures who communicated with one another and that's you know i can't really deal with that with my attack sounds and my death sounds so that normally is very important to know and would in our case would go to the dialogue team and they would deal with that but again if you you know if you get to that information very late on in the process you probably run out of time size and

their scale in relation to other creatures in game so this is also a very important one as you seen before in the video you saw khaleesi's dragon on her shoulder very small compared to godzilla which is obviously massive and but if you just see a screenshot of the game you know you see the dragon and you see godzilla you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between them in size and again it's very important to check beforehand because it's very difficult after you create a full set of creature sounds to make the sounds very small or very big afterwards and all this will come together to find a sonic character of your creatures and again think about the three main ingredients is definitely one of the most important ones so if you i hope you can see that i put like a few example notes together how i normally approach a creature creature sound in this case i called it random dragon you can see that on the top left there and for example i put down i always do a little bit of a mind map so first of all it's just for me but later on it's really useful to share this information with my co-workers

who might have to work on that creature if it's not myself so in terms of the large dragon here the random dragon sorry it's a large size it's very aggressive it's highly intelligent it's got a few skills like a fire breath a tail swing and then here's probably a good one is a mega scream which buffs my friendly units so i would already know that indicates that i would have to create that kind of screen later on as well and also put a note that it can attack from from distance with a fireball so i probably have to think like from the very start about my distant assets as well and what that brings to the table and then on the right here in the left on the left page you can see how you know attack paint screen and how many variations i i aim to do and that equals total amount of 42 sound effects in this case and this is a good indication i can put it on a timeline and you know plan my time accordingly and on the right i think that's a very for me for myself it's very important is the potential recordings i'm going to do also the potential source i'm going to look at to just buy from from other

libraries out there so for example i have the three types which we we will hear later on more about so humans animals and non-literal recordings and when i think about a random dragon in this case i would think about you know i record myself because i can do a crazy inboard squeal which would be a great layer for this sound or i can record jack who sounds like a pig for example which is which can be very useful than animals i would you know look into pigs horses uh donkeys elephant walrus all that stuff which you know kind of has some kind of quality i would look for in a dragon in this case and then also the non-literal stuff like dry some metal cellophane uh door creaks stuff which doesn't really necessarily have anything to do with the dragon in the first place but i because you know i've done this stuff before i can actually tell that might be really handy in the end and add another uh bit of character to the creature right so we have we just ran through the pre-production aspect and we can finally look a bit into recording obviously for you know most of you will know that different

mics equals different results so i'm going to show you a few of the microphones which i love using which are really useful for creature sound recording and i'm also going to talk about the literal approach of recording humans which is um yeah very important then we're also going to look into recording animals and very importantly we're going to look at the non-literal approach which is in my opinion the most interesting one so let's have a look at the microphones i'm going to show you a little bit of information and sound samples of the sanken c100k the sennheiser mkh series and some contact mics as well so the thing can see 100k is in my opinion the most powerful weapon of a creature sound designer and that's because it just picks up signals up to 100 kilohertz so it allows you if you record in in 192 sample rate it just captures audio which is way beyond the uh you know the human hearing so what that allows us to do is if we pitch down audio with a normal mic you know you would lose all this information as long as you go one octave down you would make the sound

very muffled and therefore unusable for our for our creatures and design purposes but with the sanken and i really urge you to try it if you haven't done so before you know record yourself and pitch it down up to three octaves and it would still sound more or less crisp and uh really really interesting um a downside of the synchrony so it's unfortunately an omnidirectional mic which makes it very difficult to use outdoors um but you know it doesn't matter you can you can still use it in the studio and outdoors you just have to do a bit more cleaning up afterwards and denoising and de-burning and all that stuff and also a good tip for anyone who wants to record outdoors with a sunken is that it stops working below 10 degrees celsius and so i don't want you guys to find out the way i did because it just stopped working and how you can get around that is either wait for warmer day or you know you know these pocket warmers we have in decay once it gets really cold you just gaffer tape them to the mic and that gets around that as well so i do have some example sounds recorded with the sanctum c100k i think important for you guys to know is that it's

uh the unpitched raw recording first and then the processed and pitched sound [Music] after [Music] so the last example you had it was actually one we i created for the like ages ago for boom library creatures for the designed one and that just uses human sound so you can see how powerful that sunken is um it's it really is breathtaking so you should definitely give it a go second microphone we're going to look at is the the sennheiser mkh series in my

opinion it's a great around it's probably the the mics i use most in the field and yeah it is a very popular choice for recording in the field because they compared to the tank and they just pick up half the uh they have half the frequency response of 50 kilohertz but it's actually still great for pitching purposes which you will hear in a minute and the uh you know the positive aspect about the mkh here is that it's also available as cardio the supercardiod configuration therefore you know you can use it as ms which is probably 90 of the time what i'm what i'm doing so again in terms of here a sample with the uh mkh 8014 mono and the raw sound beforehand of myself and then pitched and processed

[Music] um yeah so again i think you can see that it's still very much usable as a lay in the creature sound and and with the upside of you know being able to recording cardioid or super cardioid the next marks we're going to look at contact mics so they are compared to the sanken and the uh sennheiser microphones they are actually quite pricey they are the the parker's barrier you can see here in the right it's actually not too pricey normally very durable i think this one would be about 300 350 dollars and it is it really is a great way to pick up different signals so what we would normally do is we would have either the sunken uh or the sennheiser mic in a in about a distance like this here like you can see right here and then we would we'd use a contact mic as a really as a different source for example i could put it on my on my throat to create something completely different

or use it somewhere in the room you know something which is resonating again to pick up a different layer of interest and to be able to choose from that later on uh down the line so what you have to keep in mind is that it picks up very dry and isolated signals so whoever you know people in here have used contact mics before they are obviously very clean sounding very isolated don't really record much of the environment itself and what's i think what also is important to keep in mind that there's a very big difference between the budget and the high-end solutions so the barcusperi has a massive frequency response and it is really a really good source and i've used other cheaper contact mic solutions before which just don't give you the same uh fidelity so let's also here with the barcus barrier let's listen to a few sound recordings with that

[Music] so yeah not necessarily something you would think that would make its way into a creature sound in the end but again really really interesting source and you know it might work later on we will see okay so we have we have done with all the different mics i use on a daily basis and you know the positives and the negative aspects of that now let's look what we actually going to recall with those mics so human recordings first of all they are very powerful sources you just heard with the samples especially with the sunken mic but also with the sennheiser and the uh you know a positive aspect about humans is they usually perform on combat on command and they can be directed so there's obviously individuals which who don't do that but we don't talk about them so normally they you know they do what we tell them to do and that's great and they can also they can normally be recorded in a in a controlled environment which you know it keeps down the time we have to spend on cleaning up all the stuff we recorded and it's just much more comfortable and unless you

hire actors it can done it can be done quite cheaply so what we tended to do on um in our warhammer production which is sent around emails to the whole office and we ask can anyone do a really weird sound and ideally can you do it in an attacking way in a painful way and you know in an idling way and and we got a few responses and we recorded them all and again what i tried to tell you before is just you know record as much source as you can possibly think of because it might come in handy later on down the line um yeah so the there's obviously not just positives about human recordings because after recording loads of different human sounds it can sound very similar once they're pitched and slowed down so if you record if i recorded all the people in the studio and later on you know i put i pitched them down two to three octaves because i want to create some really deep sounding source and it can sound a bit like a mess and it's not really again you know if we think about the three main ingredients variation is always key so we have to incorporate some different

recording techniques uh with the humans to make them sound you know to just make them stand out more another downside is that humans complain about sore throats and hoarseness so we ideally as a sound designer would like to you know keep it going until the vocal cords are just non-existent anymore but um obviously most people don't like doing that and quite frankly said it's not as much fun you know i can spend hours in the studio and record humans but it's i i do much prefer doing what this guy on the right here is doing and you know going outdoors and actually capturing animal recordings and animal recordings they can be very rewarding as like certain animals they just produce great and powerful sounds and they you know i can't just reproduce by by any humans and unfortunately they're very difficult to achieve and most animals don't make noises on commands so anyone who you know of you people who went out there and tried to record animals normally when you point your mic towards them they're completely silent but as soon as you turn away they would just uh start vocalize so

that's obviously annoying and it's also time consuming so you have to spend a lot of time in the field recording animals to actually get what you're after and yeah and obviously it's mostly outdoors in an uncontrolled environment so it's it's you know it brings a lot of editing time with it a lot of cleaning up time and so on but definitely sometimes animal recordings are absolutely necessary again in in terms of variation first of all which i have mentioned just a minute ago but also certain sounds can they can't be reproduced by humans or at least i don't know any so if you do know any just refer them to me because i would like to hear that for example horses bears seals vultures they just have some kind of again character to them which is very difficult for a human to do so the real thing is definitely best in this case um with animals they can be animal recordings can be very pricey if agencies have to be involved so due to the fact that it's a rare thing that a an animal can you know vocalize on command there are some p

there are some agencies in the uk who specialize in in advertising you know training animals for advertising and movie purposes but they do know it's a rare thing and they charge you for it accordingly so that's obviously a downside and those recordings sometimes can also be dangerous so i always you know when recording wildcats or stags in mating season it really is better to be on the other side of the cage or have a very very long boom pool at your disposal so just some some tips for you for you guys um in terms of animal recordings because i'm sure some of you have actually not done one before i think the first question you you have to ask yourself before you go out in the field is where am i recording so again with us in the uk is very it's a very noisy environment loads of flight paths and and birds and and motorways so it's really not ideal but you can obviously find spaces which are quiet enough to record those animals so i would recommend to do a racquet beforehand so just to go there

and actually record the surroundings again this is an advantage that you just put that in your archive and you can you know listen back to it later on or you could also share it with your teammates if you're not the one going on the recording but other people are you have to make yourself aware of what are you recording you know it's a difference of recording horses uh to recording wildcats you just might want to have more mics to record horses or less mics so definitely make yourself aware of what you are recording and also the question of how much do i think i can get out of it is is something you might be confronted by your lead or by a financial director because they want to know where you spent the money on and it's a very difficult question to answer but um a tip for you to really get out most of your recordings is to actually talk to the people who who take care of the animals or who train the animals because they would normally know these little tricks for example before they get fed they're really vocal or you know if you turn away one of the animals then they start to get vocal and all these tricks are really important for you to actually get the sound you're

after how dangerous is it going to be again not really a good question i can help you with just plan your insurance accordingly i guess and and what equipment do i need as you can see on the right that's our current boom library setup which is obviously overpowered for most sessions but i tend to take more stuff out with me than i actually need to just in case some animal bites my windshield or bites my cable that i have a spare one in the car right so now we have dealt with the human recording aspect and the animals i actually want to do a bit of a listening test with you guys so i show you two sounds um and i want you to then lift your hand and you know you tell me which file is made just out of human sounds so that's sound number one i'll play that again and sound number two

sorry for that i played them both together so but who of you thinks that sound number one was made just out of human sounds please lift your hand okay and what about sound number two yeah great i have to disappoint you unfortunately so sound number two was the one which wasn't made just out of human sounds so sound number one my good friend and colleague byron bullock made out of his own voice and i don't know if it speaks for him to sound like a ball or a pig but it's still very impressive and sound number two was a giant we had in total war warhammer and that i vocalized that myself but i had to unfortunately use some walrus sounds for the guttural thing because i just couldn't produce that sound so very interesting again to hear how we are fooled by you know the believability of that sound especially that ball sound sound number one right so now we're going to have a look at the non-literal approach so some of the best layers in my opinion for creature sounds that don't have to

come from humans or animals so for example think about tire squeals balloon stretches door creeks dryers on metal high-pitched scrapes these are all sounds which can make a real difference in creature sound design and a good advice i can give you is look for sounds and not for props and what i mean by that is that you know because i'm i'm a bit of a sound nerd and i'm trying to you know i'm basically going through my day with open ears and i have my recorder in in my bag or a notepad where if i hear something really weird and really interesting i either take a note or record it on the spot so i can later on doesn't necessarily have to be a sanken or you know the sennheiser mic but i can at least sketch that sound and i can come back to it later and that's really important because the non-literal approach is not something you just you know get up in the morning and do or if you can then it's obviously great but it's normally not the case it can definitely add another layer of interest to the creature and make it sound different to everything else and again all about character and variation and the believability as well

so in this case you could hear that's a non-literal recording of just some balloon scrapes i blew up a balloon and just you know just dragged my fingers uh on that and also i i combined that with a human scream so and if we listen to that again just listen to how the first sound is to humans squeal and then it goes into that balloon and just just sounds like nothing else and that's really what i'm after in terms of creatures understand let's listen to that again quickly [Music] [Applause] so the non-literal approach is creatively definitely the biggest challenge because we you know it just takes a lot of time to to to find the right props and the right sounds but it is definitely the most rewarding because if you can tell someone that he created a great creature sound with just a balloon they'd probably be amazed and that's obviously what we want us you

know as sound designers we want to recognition of our other colleagues because most people most players wouldn't actually know to tell the difference it's also very time consuming you know again because it's just a very time consuming process to find all these different sounds and finding the right spots and props to record can be very difficult so again my tip for all of you is to just listen out for stuff like that like today in the morning i opened my hotel door and it sounded like i think it's called motu of the godzilla movie and yeah so i recorded it and i'll come back to it later and hopefully can use it in one of the future projects so the next video i'm going to show you is some a combination of the non-literal of some of the non-literal recordings we did for total war warhammer also some of the animal recordings as [Music] well [Music]

[Music] [Applause] [Music] see unfortunately i have to say that the last cow sound didn't make it in the game but i'm still i'm still amazed that i can actually reproduce a cow sound so all my my people in austria are incredibly proud of me um so yeah so now we've we've actually went through the pre-production process the recording process and finally we can actually you know what we always wanted to we can get stuck into design bit so this is the process where it all comes together and ideally after you know doing all these processes and different recordings we would uh we would know what we uh what we want to try to to achieve by now but sometimes it can still feel more like throwing paint on the canvas and seeing what happens and this is absolutely fine because at this stage

still now it's still a lot of experimenting with sounds and i will also show you a video in a minute where you can see the struggle of trying to make these different layers work together and i think at this point i have to stress that the door of your choice is actually not important so i hear loads of people telling me that reaper sounds more analog or logic is super smooth and all that stuff but i can really say that you should stick to the tools you you know you feeling comfortable with and also feel comfortable with spending hours and hours on one kind of sound and unless you obviously have to collaborate with people because then you know it obviously dictates what you have to use and it makes it much easier to share projects and files with your co-workers so just a basic obviously basic statement now creature sound design consists of layers i think you got that by now everything i showed you over the last half an hour there is you know hardly ever there will be one sound which is enough so even though we create a great source material with the sank and it still needs to be

layered up with different material to you know to get that to that character we are we're always after and to get to that believable creature so the art of creature sound design is to make all the different layers work together and sound like a homogenous creature like one creature and not like many creatures and so we have to focus our attention on internal relation between the different layers and that's uh i think in my opinion that's the most important aspect of creature sound design it's not the plugins it is the source and the tonal relation to each other so let's have a let's have a look at a video i put together i tried to show you the importance of first of all how the pitch between the different layers works together i think it's important for you to know that it's not intended to sound super crazy awesome at the end but i think you will get the get the message just have a look at this video now

hey [Music] um [Music] so yeah i think you can see the struggle here so the initial sound i i was actually happy to start with the the growl sound where i all the other layers are kind of

you know pitch to to match that initial sound but then i decided in the end to add an intrasound which i again really like but then it completely messed up the tonal relation of my initial layer so i had to pitch down the initial layer and this is a very simple example of a very big problem you know where you just have to still experiment with different layers different source you find yourself deleting stuff grabbing new stuff and again it all comes down to the source and what you recorded beforehand so you can or what you bought you know library wise to really be able to choose from a large amount of source material so i like to think that approaching those designs can be a bit like arranging music so because of the whole pitching relationship so if you think of a guitar riff and the bass you know playing to it then it could either sound in tune perfectly in tune and it harmonizes or it can sound out of tune and a bit bad and just not really matching so pitch matching is the most important and plugins can't take that work off you so again

similar to the guitar example the creature sounds like the high element the hiss for example and the the bass elements so the kind of body resonance they have to match together otherwise it will sound not believable and it would sound like many creatures rather than one homogenous one so in my opinion and i think that's quite important for the way i work is that good source can allow you to work with just volume and eq again the example i just showed you is not really sounding that great but you can still tell that you know it could potentially be great but there's actually nothing no plugins are in there this is just just recordings i made and just pitch volume and i think in that example not even eq but nevertheless there's still plugins out there which are must-have for every creature sound designer and sound design in general and i want to show you some of of those which i use on a daily basis so first of all it's isotope by x morph ii elastic pitch the magique waves low air and also crota's dehumanizer too

so i think it's important to mention that you know i could probably fill another talk at gdc uh about izotope about its functions and how it makes my life so much easier um just simply anyone who goes out in the field who works in post-production probably has used isotope before and we just denoise stuff de-click stuff you know draw up birds from recordings it really is a powerful tool every everyone should have a look at if you haven't done so before synaptic morph 2. so this is a plug-in which has been around for quite a while and somehow it just completely went past me and i didn't know until just a few months or actually i think a year ago and what it basically does just a simple explanation it takes one spectral characteristic of one sounds and projects it to another and i mean just you know saying that actually sounds pretty cool for my purposes so have a listen to that example i just put something together for you [Music]

so in this example i have a metal ground a non-literal recording uh morphed with a an elephant raw and i mean it's just amazing let's listen to the and i actually want to hear it again [Music] and this is so you know again another out of this world example which you wouldn't get if you just record an elephant or metal chrome but put together putting that time in to just experiment with different layers and with the help of this great tool here uh really is worth it so have a look at that as well elastic pitch that's just a plug-in i love using for not just pitching stuff down but actually automating the pitch over time so what what i'm also trying to do with my creatures i'm trying to automate pitch with movement so for example if one of my creatures would die in game i try to you know get the acid to pitch down when it's actually falling over almost make it sound like a final breath and this plug-in does it in a really nice way it doesn't color the sound in any way and it also doesn't step the pitch which

some other plug-ins too so that's a great one to look at as well the maggi queue is actually something which most people don't know about i think that's a kind of a little secret to share with you guys especially the the orange two and a half kilohertz knob and the air gain because of the nature of our of our layers where we all pitched them down quite heavily sometimes even though we record with the sanken or the sennheiser we we lose some of the high fidelity and i find that if i used those two uh knobs here that i can just inject a bit of life back into them a bit of brilliance and a bit of sparkle which is again sounds like a very basic thing but it actually does make a difference so again if you have the chance download the demo and and try it yourself waveflower i don't think i have to say too much about that it's just a plugin i've been using for years and it helps me with creating the kind of you know that bassiness and the bigness of the sounds and uh again highly recommended to to anyone sound design in general but also for creature sound designs

and to see humanizer 2 which is i think is a is a great tool because i think version one was already amazing but for me it was the downside that it was a standalone plug-in and i couldn't use it in in pro tools my daw of choice so what they've done with dehumanizer 2 is is amazing because you have i don't know how many hundred parameters there are in this plugin and it's also on a modular basis you can drag in whatever you want and it's also fully automatable and you can really lose yourself and again you know what i tried to to tell you guys today is just to experiment and with this plug-in you have uh yeah you have a lot to do if you want to just you know experience all the functions there's a lot of time to be spent on that plug-in and also crota's are here gdc so have a look at at their booth if you want to if you want to know more about that plug-in so um i've got another video for you this is actually a a creature which made it in the final release of total war warhammer it's a dragon ogre a

large dragon ogre and i tried to i again captured my pro tools session here and i show you every single layer you can see what it does and you can see it sounds quite odd when you play by themselves but actually when they all play together at least in my opinion they sound quite cool in the sound pretty much believable let's have a look at that [Music] uh

um [Music] yeah so you can see the layers by themselves don't sound like much and it just takes a lot of time for me to just pitch them all together and then you know the high elements would lose all their bass and with the bass layers i would try and emphasize that bass and then at the end i get to something like this and i'm very happy but then i have to do five or six variations and i'm again very sad so um yeah i think that's a good example of how it's been broken down and you know this is actually an example where i used quite a lot of different layers because i try sometimes to limit myself because obviously the less layers i use

the easier it gets for me to actually get them work together right so after the um after we re the record the pre-production part the recording part and also the design part we do have to look into implementation which is the last part of the process apart from the mix obviously and i think it's so important these days that if the implementation is bad even the best sound can't save it so it does make me very upset if i spend that much time on a sound you know like weeks or maybe a week or two weeks and then in the end in the game it just doesn't sound the way i expect it uh to sound so we are dependent on great systems for sounds to make them shine properly we really have to you know this is very important that they actually do in pro tools or in your door they sound great but as soon as they come in the game there's so many different factors and obviously the mix has to work around it and it's really important to get stuck into implementation so in my opinion in my opinion implementation is fifty

percent again it's completely useless to spend all this time on all these processes if the implementation is bad um but i also have to say there's countless possibilities of implementing audio so anyone who worked in games before knows that there's so many different things you know that as wise as f mod there's so many different engines everyone every company works with different tools and therefore i can't unfortunately just show you everything about the uh about implementing creature sounds but what i decided to do is actually to give you again some tips which helped me in the past especially when working on total war warhammer a very creature-heavy game uh you know for you just to maybe gain some inspiration from um so i think in terms of creature sound design the hierarchy setup is in is incredibly important so again in terms of warhammer we had small medium large and extra large and huge creatures so again this is a hierarchy decision we had to make very early on in the process because you know many people work on that game and we have to

later on mix that stuff as well so it's very important to always keep that kind of hierarchy together almost like the layers of a creature sound design because it does make it easier in the end tool to you know make the large creature sounds bigger than everything else and not to lose yourself in in the hierarchy in the end another very interesting aspect which unfortunately i don't really have time to get too much into today is the modular approach versus the one shot approach so everything we i've showed you today was all based on one shot so for example i have an attack animation i make this attack sound and it would just you know i put a trigger point into the animation it would play in game and and happy days but sometimes it can be necessary that there's so many different animations a basic sound set of articulations like i showed you before of my random dragon example with 42 sounds would just not do it because there's too many animations and they would just not sync tightly to the animations so what we tried to do in some cases with warhammer and with other games as

well is that we tried to for example a scream we would divide them up in three parts like a start sound a middle sound and a stop sound which makes it of course that's great for variation purposes but anyone who has tried to you know blend them in game before it's all again quite tricky so do you have to lay a problem in the first place and then you also have to blend between those three parts in the game engine which can be tricky but again if you if you pull it off it sounds amazing in game because you have uh the the best amount of variation distant versus close assets i think that's a very basic thing to say it probably seems a bit stupid to talk about it but i think it's it's incredibly important again if we think about the three main ingredients about perspective that we always as a rule and i don't know who set that rule but whenever i start a creature sound design i start with a close-up close to the camera kind of sound but sometimes it would actually be would be good to start with a distant sound before and then work yourself you know towards the closed sound and

how we solved that invoice before is that we just had a closed sound we had a distant sound which was created out a closed sound but sometimes had to lose some of the layers to actually make it sound distant so again another problem we were facing and then we just blend them over distance and with in-game parameters as like a queue uh or reverb use of cone attenuation i think was something which really changed the way we were mixing our games as well so you can imagine that like a cone coming out of the creature's mouth and whenever it turns away from the camera the perspective would change accordingly and you can automate the eq and not automate but the game engine would deal with the eq settings like low pass and high pass and all that and it would just again work on the believability of our game and work on the believability of our creature sound volume equals size make use of it this is another really basic thing and you probably laugh about if i tell you that you know obviously large creatures should be louder than small creatures but i don't know why it happens so much but if i look at a hierarchy

small medium large creatures every starting point is actually 0 db or minus 10 or whatever but they're all equal and it's actually a good starting point to just you know do that gain staging in a really simple way beforehand because it just really uh makes the whole mixing process so much easier in the end and another thing the sweetener layers uh which is something we made use of heavily not just for creature sounds but also for other sound effects but for example if we had big dragon sound like the huge creatures like the giants and the dragons we could actually if they're very close to the camera we would play a sweetener sound on top of that something we created just for that effect to you know add an uh proximity effect which could be a stereo sound or a quad sound even to really fill out that space and to make that huge creature which is already huge make even more huge because that's what we want we may want to make everything sound really loud and powerful so yeah we are pretty much at the end of my presentation i just give you a summary of the most important aspects what i've been talking about today again

pre-production is key you definitely have to know what you're working on i think it's it's again very important to mention that the post-product the pre-production is important and you know it is worth it reading all the books about the creatures you know get to know their characteristics and special skills because it will pay off in your recording process later on and also in the design and you will always be in brief or most of the time anyway be creative with the recording process but sometimes the most simple approach can get the most satisfying result trial and error so again with the recording process it's all about recording as much as you can you know really don't be scared to go out there and just record all day edit it up put it in your library and then later on you can choose from that stuff i can't stress enough how important it is to really you know have enough source to choose from because when i talk to to some of you guys beforehand before this actual talk the first question i've always or i'm most of the time being asked is what plugins do you use

and again i think my plugin and my plugin is the source and i think nobody can take that away from you if you really record as much as possible pitch matching eq and volume those three ingredients work with good source so again this is um in terms of the design process obviously stick with those three um things for start you know match the pitch eq the the elements you want to and then you know do the volume offsets do some fades and i'm pretty sure it will get you far away and i think it's you know and afterwards you can use all the plugins in the world but just make make sure that the first step is always pitch matching eq and volume and i think most importantly get stuck into implementation if you can if you freelance it at least try to get involved so i'm now in a position where i'm freelance again and i do want to make sure that my sounds end up in the game you know as intended and to sound as good as possible obviously and if you're in-house you know talk to the talk to the implementation team sorry

get stuck in get stuck into implementation obviously in the in-house it's much easier because you actually you're on the spot and you you don't have to write as many emails as i have i have to do normally and then finally believability and character the most important aspects of creature sound design if you think about what we're trying to achieve with you know the whole creating games in the first place we want to create a universe for the player to get immersed in and you know to to feel at home in a way and that's exactly what we're trying to do what we're trying to achieve with our creature sounds as well to make them believable and you know to kind of define their character of something which isn't real in the in the real world but obviously real because designers designed it so it's all about believability and character so uh yeah thank you very much for your attention um i think that's pretty much it actually again if you could fill out the evaluation form that would be great because we always like to get feedback

on the talks and i hope you enjoyed it and obviously i'm looking forward to answering all your questions now [Applause] so i'm curious about your process for uh making variations so once you have the first you know variation uh do you tend to be able to just rely on modulating those existing source assets or do you have to bring in totally different assets for the other variations yeah so that's actually a very good question and i can't believe i haven't covered that in my presentation but it's it's a very good so again when i was talking about the source obviously you know what you normally do is you create um so if i record my own myself screaming for example i would create several different variations of that in the first place so then later on and also all like modern libraries do that as well they provide one sound but they also provide you know eight different

variations or six variations and then what i would do is as long as i get one sound to work in my in my session like an attack sound for example i would then duplicate the whole thing and try and shift everything so i use the next the next kind of variation of that see if it works and then the whole game starts again it probably doesn't work so again i would replace layers but again obviously because i already set some kind of style with the first variation then it gets more complicated but yeah i would i would tend to do i'm sorry i would tend to duplicate the sound and try and just to change the the files itself okay and then see again if it works and if it doesn't work then i have to restart so is it actually the opposite you leave the modulation and pitching more or less the same and then yeah no i mean obviously you know the pitching can vary so that's an um oh yeah i see what you mean no yeah i would leave it the same because you know the most of these sounds would then work but then if i play the second sound if i play the second variation the pitch is again shifting slightly i then go back into the different layers and try to match

them together again and then for the third and fourth and fifth variation it's exactly the same awesome well thank you very much hi uh so i think i know the answer to this but i'm asking just in case you're pitching the layers to match them so that they fit together and then are you then doing more expressive pitching on the master bus to kind of pitch the whole thing up or down if you want to make it more expressive yes so i think that was i think you're referring to that uh example of the elastic pitch plugin yeah it really depends so as you said rightfully i tried to pitch all the different layers together first of all that so that harmonizes and it sounds like you know like believable and then yeah exactly on the master buster could have like an elastic pitch plug-in which affects all the layers at the same time and you know for example when the creature falls over i just go like that you know pitch it down or pitch it up when it does a kind of raw sound effect to just add a bit of more like a point of interest to it so that

would happen on the master bus yeah no worries anyone else perfect i think we're done thank you very much guys you