Tomb Raider Rebooted: Audio Reimagined

[Music] started hello and welcome this is the Tomb Raider rebooted audio reimagined my name is Jack Grillo as the lead sound designer for Tomb Raider this is Alex Wilmer music supervisor this session is being recorded so we've asked to ask you to please silence your cellphone's the talk will be broken up into a few discussions I will speak about creative direction voiceover and sound effects Alex will speak about music and then we'll open it up for some questions let's start off by playing a trailer from the 2012 BGA's it features our composer Jason graves conducting a live orchestra [Applause]

so much has happened our captain Avenger have you heard any of the others nothing were hunted by the islands of habitants Sam listen I'm gonna get you out of there

you can do it Laura after all you're a Croft I don't think I'm that kind of Christ show you you just don't know it yet [Music] [Music] Oh

[Music] if I don't survive none of us will [Applause] okay so we're gonna start with all right we're gonna start with a bit about ourselves I've been a sound effects designer for the past 18 years specializing in games since 2000 early in my career I worked as a sound

designer for a few of the early medal of honor titles and as lead sound designer for Medal of Honor allied assault PC I went on to be a consultant for the first Call of Duty game for PC and audio director for Call of Duty finest hour I've been with Crystal Dynamics working as lead sound designer for the Tomb Raider series since the last four years for Tomb Raider my responsibilities included defining the creative direction for the audio department generating sound design elements voiceover directing and editing cinematics editing and mixing assisted with general implementation and assisted with the overall mix yeah and I've been in the industry for about eight years I was for four years I was working in a company called Berkeley sound artists where it's a audio post-production facility that mainly worked on documentary films and independent features but there I was the director of video game audio which is a title that I gave myself to sound fancy

in the video game industry which didn't work very well and and at Crystal I was my first project was Guardian of Light and I was then on to Mater I was the music supervisor for that but we were a small team of four people the other two or right there and we we so we all had to do a little bit of everything but that was my main role so as this title discussed in this discussion States the Lucent Tomb Raider was a reboot it was officially the ninth tomb to made a title but be good but because it was the law Croft origin story we had the amazing opportunity to create a new spin on the iconic tomb raider and Lara Croft brand production on tomb raider was the best of both worlds in terms of development models it was a cross between the name recognition of an industry household name and brand new IP we had the unique

opportunity as a team to look carefully at each aspect of the franchise celebrate the conventions we wanted to keep redefined parts we wanted to change and to create from scratch new design elements and gameplay conventions the Tomb Raider brand has been around for 18 years and along with the natural cycles of development turnover comes plenty of new blood for audio and related disciplines new people filled several key positions including game director lead sound designer music supervisor composer story and cinematics writer a narrative designer and of course our Lara Croft this infusion of new blood was a shortcut to new ideas and fresh perspectives at every turn we're all challenged to bring our own creative voices to the franchise to help bring new life to the series and again is an expression of the best of both worlds concept many of the other key positions in the audio chain were held by Tomb Raider veterans including the creative director game director senior audio engineer and cinematics director this

overall combination of talent created an ideal setting for creative collaboration and execution as I stated in the introduction one of my responsibilities was to define the creative direction for the audio department and to be perfectly honest I find that a standalone creative direction for sound is more academic than practical audio is often a supportive discipline and because our work must blend with all other disciplines from animation visual effects background art and UI to core gameplay design and the emotional arc of the narrative I find that audio behaves as a kind of glue an essential ingredient that ties everything else together for a game like Tomb Raider I leave the role of audio at its best is to help bring a motion to the narrative excitement to the gameplay and clarity to the controls so instead of defining a standalone creative direction for sound I find that it's much more productive to study the themes of the game as a whole and from that exercise identify the key

pillars or anchors to focus on throughout the project Tomb Raider is a story of how Lara Croft a young ambitious and often naive archeologist becomes stranded on a mysterious island struggles against harsh environmental conditions and hostile local forces takes on the responsibility of the death of her crew and several of her closest friends witnesses the corruption of greed corruption and greed of supranational powers and a sense from the experience an elite survivalists and battle-tested hero the brand campaign for Tomb Raider focus primarily on survival as the central theme and while this concept was important to us throughout development I didn't feel that I can use it as an anchor to help with the sound design but I did find that if we took the concept of Lara's character arc as an anchor from 99 Venerable to unsure all the way to confident and deadly we now have something solid to use to guide us through a sound design choices I want to

step back for a moment say that using a character arc as a sound design anchor it was new for me in my past experience as a first-person shooter developer I always used to consider the players weapon as the primary anchor this focus would drive most of my creative and logistical decisions ranging from field recording all the way to the final mix but for Tomb Raider we had to think more broadly and ultimately found that using Lara as our anchor would yield the most exciting and dynamic mix and what it allows to most directly support the overall creative goals for the game so what does it mean to say that Lara Croft is a sound design anchor for Tomb Raider well generally it means that the primary decisions for creating organising implementing and mixing must take into account the actions emotions and evolution of our lead character this obviously includes voiceover direction but it also extends to creating a proper mix for Lara's basic traversal and movement dynamics sound design for combat and weaponry and of course a musical score that focuses first and foremost on Lara's emotional state as

opposed to static as opposed to the setting or action Alex will get into a greater detail about how we executed an emotional score so and simply introduce the idea here the music was directed to play out through the eyes of Lara not as a backdrop of the island or its inhabitants we used themes and instrumentation to represent these elements of the game but they were always done as if they were filtered through Lara's expression or Lara's experience first understanding the themes and settling on an anchor is the first step towards executing a creative direction the next step is to match the sound design style with the tones and the narrative of the art direction Tomb Raider has a serious narrative narrative tone characters and events are all grounded with a sense of realism and although the premise of the conflict has supernatural overtones we push those aspects of the story through a filter of realism the art direction follows the narrative tone with realistic character proportions

realistic environments and puzzles based on simple physics as opposed to magic all of this have easily pointed to a sound design style that can be described as realistic or authentic we worked hard to make the world feel alive and real and so that the player can more directly feel connected to the characters and the events the game itself has many over-the-top sequences which we designed and mixed with excitement in mind if the overall tone of the sound design was intentionally realistic I'm going to show a video here which focus on focuses on how we worked on small details and I'll push for realism the lifeboat where are they they must have Greenland

okay take it slow okay so the most obvious way for audio production to support Lara's character arc is through the voiceover this of course isn't fully in the control of the audio team to exit execute it starts from the narrative arc in writing which drive the cinematics but from there we can use the content in the cinematics to

direct the performance of the surrounding voice-over content we use Lara's character arc to ensure that all of the in-game voice-over and vocalizations match the specific part of her journey in Tomb Raider there are very few systemic or core voiceover hints rather the moments of gameplay that required hints were written in record with those unique settings in mind early on in production we recorded a large batch of generic reactions hints and motivations intended to be used as needed throughout production but these lines were abandoned along the way because they never quite matched to what Lara was going through in any given moment as the game starts for example Lara needs to convince herself that she's capable of making a big jump or that she can stomach skinning a deer or that she can bring herself to kill another human being for the middle of the game these hints and motivations become more subtle and by the end they're totally unnecessary an end development even if we chose to include a hint or motivation with the same exact wording as in a different part of the game we would record unique performances

of each of these moments it's the best match for current state of mind Lara's vocalizations for breathing and effort sounds the most often matched to her animations which were shared files reused throughout the game because of this we didn't have the technical mechanism to change these sounds as the game progresses instead Carl Gallagher our senior audio engineers set up the system to be driven from her health which created a micro character art at full health Lara's basic movement animations were supported with subtle breathing sounds which she becomes injured these same animations are supported by more labored breathing and struggling effort performances on top of this many of the set peach peace action spikes of the game featured unique jumping landing or climbing events for these sequences we made sure to add vocalizations that best matched that state of her journey from scared and vulnerable at the beginning to confident in deadly at the end I'll show another video which demonstrates a large state of mind early in the game where she's scared and cold

what we did is the the first part that has a in-game movement and we overrode her standard breathing with trembling and panic sounds that then leads directly into the cinematic [Applause] [Music] looks about [Applause] [Music] has anyone listening please respond her

[Applause] next I'll show a video of Lara where she's a bit more confident in the middle of the game she's still exhausted and and battle weary but you'll see a bit of the progression of her character I'm in some kind of shanty town near the fortified palace long story I'm heading towards it I'd like to switch gears now and talk a bit about one of our other sound design challenges the weapons the combat system

for Tomb Raider was a dramatic overhaul from previous titles combat became a strong standalone component of the game and provided a series of pacing spikes for the player one of my general creative goals with weapons sound design is to make them feel authentic powerful and satisfying to fire basically I want the player to have fun with them I want them to enjoy the feel of each weapon so much though that they lose track of their ammo just to open fire for me the approach I like to start with with my design is from this all the secondary actions bullet impacts ricochets shells ejecting and hitting ground reload events and the various handling and movement actions tend to come first this process allows me to have a solid context for designing and mixing the explosive fire sounds on top of it I also like to break the implementation into several layers with limited or even zero variety four layer I might have five sounds five different sounds overlapping for any given weapon fire and I like to focus my attention on how

these elements mix together in game rather than focusing on on creating a large array of asset variation most other sound categories need extensive asset variation but I find that weapons sound design requires focus I think this approach gives the weapons a more direct more direct sound and sense of purpose and show a quick video of [Applause] [Applause]

so as a first person shooter veteran I felt that I first that I'd be quite at home with the combat and weaponry sounds but I found the biggest challenge was Lara's star weapon the bow Lara's bow can be used during combat hunting puzzle-solving and for traversal this range of use made designing and mixing it sounds rather complicated as it had to sound consistent yet appropriate in all these context another complicating factor was the fact that realistic bow and arrow performances aren't typically loud or explosive yet we wanted to get the player satisfying sound feedback during both stealth and explosive combat scenarios all told the bow went through countless iteration passes it was probably the first sound design the first sound design task I had when I joined the team and it was such an important element to the overall sound design that we tweaked the sounds and mix of the bow throughout development and be honest the only end point for working on it was shipping the game ultimately the bow is made up of a

handful of simple sounds one realistic bow firing sound mixed with a few overlapping sounds of flapping rubber tubing along with a low-end sweetener these same elements are used for all the bow in all its contexts and even for all bow upgrades which I feel gives the bow a strong Center and provides familiar feedback throughout its use and here's a video showing off the bow used in combat and then as a traversal device [Applause]

now another strong feature of the overall sound design mix for Tomb Raider is the ambient sounds or more specifically the weather in our story the island of Yamatai is home to the japanese sun queen who can control the weather using the rain wind or lightning to her advantage or as an expression of her anger or fear with this in mind we wanted to make use of the natural dynamics of weather sounds to give the island character and purpose heavy rain and wind events exist throughout the game along with a couple of snow storms and an array of waterfalls rivers streams and the surrounding ocean I used to joke with the team that the ambient sounds for Tomb Raider was a greatest hits compilation of white noise these weather events created difficult mix challenges for us as we needed to support the environment with a powerful often over-the-top mix in order to match the creative direction yet we still needed to carve out space in the mix for Lara the technique we use to implement ambient sounds is based on designing a large number of standalone sounds for each weather category individually

placed in these sounds in each level and allowing the combinations of these sounds in-game to create the unique sounding environments there are no scene or level based ambient mixes in Tomb Raider this gave us the added flexibility to tune every corner of every level and it allowed us to control the mix of the various categories to suit the needs of the narrative or gameplay for example in our mixing system we could use Lara's voiceover or weapon sounds to dynamically duck the volume of individual elements of the ambience or if necessary the entire ambience other benefits of this technique are added movement and spatial presence for the ambient silence and because our cinematics playback engine used the live ambiences in-game transitions between cinematics and game plays smooth and dynamic one more note about the ambient sounds for Tomb Raider one of the benefits of drawing special attention to the weather events on the island left us with the opportunity to relish in the more subtle environments some of my favorite locations in the game of the quiet forested areas where the player learns basic traversal mechanics or how to use the bow for

hunting these are the areas of the game that I feel are truly immersive and provide much-needed pacing break from the action spikes that surround them I'm going to show another video here that shows off some of our dynamics with the with the ambience this video shows off also some of the variety of implementation techniques that we used the sounds were attached to individual birds and the entire bird

flock wind background ocean sounds were often white noise sounds and then the individual ocean waves all combining together to make the overall soundscape okay I'm gonna pass this on over to Alex to now speaking about music okay so alright so for a 2-meter I had I think quite lofty goals for the for the music just to give you some background I used to come to the GDC in you know eight years ago or so I started coming and I would talk to developers here and and at the time I had a lot of opinions about music and video game and I was felt like there was maybe a disconnect between composers and the people actually

implementing the music that those those weren't the same same person and I felt like there was more emphasis put on making the music make sense as opposed to really scoring the emotional content that makes sense so when I when I took on the responsibility on terminator these were the goals that I had to truly score to create a truly scored experience score the emotion support the character arc of Lara create a unique identity have highly dynamic music and never hearing the same piece of music twice I think there were a lot of people working getting video games you know that those are quite lofty goals but with the exception of highly dynamic music view if you took that list and went to like a film director as a composer and said I want to do these things in your movie you'd kind of get laughed out of the room so it's it's a it's a big deal for video games and the

reason why is to you know immerse hypnotized suspend disbelief captivate whatever that idea is because I think it comes from a part of the brain that does he isn't really associated with language it's something that you know drawls focus and you lose track of time that kind of thing so in order to achieve something like that you need to plan it really really well and and the way that we started was with the core themes jason Graves who's our composers very seasons at this kind of work and when we started working on the theme to deliver them first on piano and this is Lara's theme and so we iterated on on that for a while to you know work out the theme but we we only did it on

piano so you could just focus on what were the notes just through some sense of how we were establishing dynamics early on this is the island theme and a little [Music] so once we did establish our themes we started working on the overt rare and to me this was a sort of first for our industry I'm not sure they're there maybe people who've done it before but I'd never heard of it we created a basically an eight-minute piece of music that was essentially a guide for for the rest of the sport and how this was built was by taking the story of the game going through the story all the major beats of the game of the major character development and then

showing Jason the the concept art for the game and and and doing that at the benefit and creating this piece of music the benefit of doing this was that you front load your iteration so [Music] this piece of music to our creative leads and and iterate in a time when there isn't a lot of game built yet so that you can't actually you know what music in the game anyway but it allows you to to get past the iteration point so once you once you actually start creating the in-game assets there's very little iteration at that point so the next thing we did was steal an idea that Jason and I both worked on a game called black site area 51 what they did was they created Suites of music and in

order to basically populate their game with as much music as they could with as few minutes as possible they created these Suites which were highly dense pieces of music this is an example of what a suite looks like just for contrast this is a scored what's court cinematic to look like so you can see that you would get a lot of tracks to work with and then what I would do is I would take these tracks and then create different mixes so out of two minutes worth of music I could get you know maybe 10 or 15 minutes worth of music for the game Jason would always deliver a mixed version that would where I could listen to it and make sense of the piece so this this is in this case it sounds like this [Music] but there's so many elements in this

piece of music that if if I was to listen to all the stems at one time it would just come out as noise so that was useful for that the the way that I could use these stems is obviously create something that almost sounds like a scored moment so this is an example of [Music] and then the other way is to create small loops where you can do seek up the sequential scoring or or layered scoring and these are a couple of examples so when you design it that way and you

don't come at it from an angle of trying to reuse cinematics you come in it from the angle of I'm going to reorganize your stems you you end up with a very large amount of music that you can you know lay down a base layer because like one of the goals was the beginning that I wanted to have unique music throughout the game so to give you a sense of these Suites this is a personal suite from early you can generally how we worked was we would refer to the overture and we would have the Jason would withdraw from that the traversal suite was in this case all the traversal streets were at the same tempo and so you can see that if all the

pink post-its are are the different traversal Suites throughout the game and if for example I needed traversal music in between I posted I could combine [Music] different Suites because they're all in the same tempo by the way in the background this is a color script that I had in my wall which the art department uses to users to provide their palettes they're usually based on I mean they're based on the story and the emotion that is trying to be conveyed in in a certain level so it's very useful to use for music - this is a suite from later on in the game this is representing more of the scavengers who are who are the first major enemy that you can face and so Lara's perspectives on them is that they're chaotic [Applause]

[Music] the this piece represents the only towards the end of the game snow section of the game and they have a much more deliberate [Music] measures rhythm [Applause] so to give you a sense of scoring traversal the way that the process worked was that we would first of all create these loops out out of the sweets to lay down the the base layer and this is an example of one of those so this is

very early on in the game and so we have we're building Orchestra with Lara's character yes she kind of grows so you can tell it's all sort of individual instruments the next and that came from the sweet so that we're creating very granular elements of music to do the [Music] when there was a sequence that was too difficult to score using sweets I would send a video capture to Jason and then he would score that specifically and I'd send him what came before and what comes after so he could he could join him so

I'm gonna show you video now of the video the Jack showed earlier but with music and and talked a little bit over [Music] the lifeboat it was coming flute stinger here that is two notes one rising above the other creates an optimistic feeling or you see that light flow then maybe your friends are alive okay take his name as Laura approaches this log I bring it up high [Music] and then I hide the end of the tone

under the singer when she slips because of the okay we have this driving profession [Music] and another food stinger and this food singer is just a single note there's a little bit more trepidatious but it reminds you keeps you keeps your friends in your mind huh [Music] so now I take away all the music and that's a technique to make the player the player feel uncomfortable or uneasy

this is the volume of the strings as Lara gets to the edge of the way [Applause] and there's another flutes tonight the stinger this time two notes descending [Music] so what I was trying to say with the flute stingers was was that by that moment of the game you realize this place is pretty dangerous environment for for Lara and and you're hinting it you know the sense that maybe maybe your friends are dead and so every every essentially every piece of music that's

in the game has a purpose whether or not it is conveyed in that in that way or received in that right way and just as a note to the the the volume of the the violins going up as Laura gets across the wing what you we're trying to do there is really anticipate what the players doing and as much as we can do that in the game Madhu that this is an example of at this point in the game Laura has opened many doors with her climbing ax it's a mechanic where you match the X button button but it's it's a mechanically you can break out it at this point though this door divides two major sections of the game the first section percussion is used as a major element in the score after the door brass becomes the main element and so I

make an assumption here that the player is going to you know button match their way through this door and and and not stop but as soon as the player makes contact with the door I anticipate the the music that follows and so I'll play this for you so you get a sense of what that sounds like [Applause] [Applause] so every time you tried to anticipate what the players gonna do you also have to take into account of what happens when they when they don't do what you want them to do so in this video I'll show you what happens if the player doesn't actually open the door

[Music] [Applause] so in scoring combat I use the number of techniques these I'm gonna change some

examples of some of the bait and most basic techniques this is lair technique so we have low intensity a low intensity loop like my mat and then a heavy moment so when Laura is firing her weapon we transition into the heavy combat and and when she's in in cover basically when she's not firing our weapon we're just gonna play the that should do it what the hell are we gonna tell the enforcers don't worry AB I will say he lost it jump to his den but you shot

[Music] so that's a pretty simple example of that implementation the next is sequential and and that's similar to the traversal that we did before and stealth singer if you kill the that's one of the combat loops so I just also listen for

when Laura jumps the gap in the video there's it goes from one combat loop to the other and if a stinger kind of helps blend that transition [Music] I can all buy liquor I heard they picked up some women in the roundup yeah the Thais chose one for the test maybe she's the one we might finally get off this rock don't get excited it always ends the

same way some poor girl burns [Music] so those two techniques are very very simple techniques but what's interesting about how the implementation was done in Tomb Raider was that every single sequence or combat setup was uniquely scored so you never get used to the systems and you can use very very simple systems like that and and the player will never recognize what exactly is controlling the music

hopefully the most of the most of the setups usually employed both of those techniques having layered stuff and and and also being sequential in this example also there we're anticipating what's gonna happen and so there's a high high frequency tone when Lars standing of the wall so the player has the opportunity to do not engage in combat so I'll play you what happens there have you show it to the server fatherland I can hold my liquor [Music] I heard they picked up some women in the roundup yeah [Music]

man I can sit in this damn place I just want so on two meter about halfway through the developments it became obvious of of the music it became obviously we needed to create a sort of found sound idea because of because of the the art style and and and just because of how the music was getting into the game it felt like we really need to really needed to create unique sounds so I asked Jason to maybe put in some chain-link fence noises and things like that and he came up with this which was basically chicken wire he is he owns chickens and and then he took a dustbin lid to create a plate to a resonating plate and and and then basically started blowing it so this is what that sound like so that was pretty

cool but the next thing he did was he he found a sculptor that lived down the road from him and who he basically went into his workshop and started finding all all these kinds of interesting elements that he could could make interesting sounds out of this is a bucket that they welded some rods onto and the rods and they started creating out of metal pipes he started creating these kind of chimes and then you know welding a bunch of metal so you could rattle this this was made to look like bamboo because it was all sort of inspired by the art of the game and because this guy's a sculptor he ended up putting them all together like this which just kind of blows my mind the the it's even got a bow like an actual though this is what the chime

sound like I'm in the boughs and those were really good elements for the for the Oni they sound very established sounds very confident and and worked well for the ancient inhabitants of the island then the vessel as they called it worked really well for the scavengers extremely primitive sounding and culture so just for some scale how big this thing is it's huge I'm going to show you a video this is the opening level of the game just to give you a sense of how the instrument was used to create a soundscape rather

than music but really sort of support the emotion of what's what's happening in this situation [Music] [Music] [Music]

[Music] got to get down

[Music] so it was really important to me personally that in the music in that section of the game really alienate the player and support the idea of a reboot that we're redefining what Lara is and so with the music you're making a very very bold statement and you're almost pushing the the the player away and saying you know this game is this game is not for you to give you a sense of the the also the dynamic range of this instrument this run-outs section you solve a puzzle and then it starts a cave-in as you as you escape you'll hear that the music is highly progressive we

have to add some elements to it like brass and some bigger drums because of the limited palette of the instrument but it's really the the key the key focus but back to what I was saying about pushing the player away what I'm trying to do is create a dynamic between between this and eventually playing Lara's theme for the first time when you escape we play Lara's theme and so what I really wanted the effect of that to be was to draw the player and you're constantly pushing them away it's the first you know maybe 20 minutes of the game so hopefully they'll continue playing up until this point because they just bought it but but when so you know because they need to experience this moment but when when they get out there and and we play the theme we play it on a piano and so you go from an instrument that is highly alien to a lot of people it's completely unique they've never heard it before to an instrument that a

lot of people have a very personal experience with and and that dynamic is what I hope kind of grabs you for the rest of the game so let's take a listen to that [Music] gotta get out of here

[Music] Thanks [Applause] I think I think we have about four minutes left for questions we kind of cut that really close sorry and if you have questions have you come up to Mike

one of the problems with potential problems with having combat music is that you know the player can use that as kind of a bad guy radar it's a kind of you know know when when guys are around or when they've been spotted what are some techniques that use to kind of prevent you know if it kind of keep the maintained a sense of constant danger in the in the world yeah I think if you if you do it the way the we were doing it where you consider each each section of combat differently and you don't rely on systems or like sort of template systems right you you avoid situations like that because you while you're playing through you experience them happening and you're like oh we're you know telegraphing to the player that that that combats about to happen or whatever and and so you avoid that because you're handcrafting everything okay so that's kind of the

that's also the reason why you do it but yeah basically took a ton of iteration and we're conscious of it as we were going through that that very problem we didn't want to Telegraph too much I'm going to keep it fresh for the player and and having that process of going over it over and over again and going from one sequence to the next kind of forced it out of us so to kind of keep the players surprised by you know maybe this is how it usually works but then sometimes it doesn't work yeah and and and experiencing like one thing to the next like go in here whenever you were working on a section it's really it's it's difficult but it if you can you know playing from the section that happened before so that you know that okay that's that's kind of what I did there so then people will expect something similar cool and kind of doing away with the idea this is how it usually happens because every time it's a new one okay thanks

Hey hey guys all right um so I loved your approach of basing the sound in music around Lara's kind of narrative arc I was curious if you think that approach would work as well like theoretically on a game where the main characters arc maybe isn't as well defined like can you use the audio to supply parts of that character that are missing or do you need the writing to kind of really be there for that character first for this sort of idea approach to work I think you know because using her arc was a new thing for me I think that each game has its own thing that will emerge as the as the anchor to use like for me in the past using the weapon for a first-person shooter was really obvious for those games different games that have kind of a different narrative structure or different focus will require a different different approach to what you're going to use as your pillar it was really clear from the early creative direction for this game that the character arc was a real focus for the entire team so it

was an easy thing and it took a while to really arrive arrive at that like consciously but it was an easy thing to really grab onto okay and yet from a music perspective I think it's the other way to think about it is like what is the narrative that is being communicated to the player and if it really is the player's narrative more than it is a character's narrative it's a if it's a first-person shooter it's more about the players experience identifying what that is and and then trying to support that emotion coming in from that angle you know thinking about more about why you're doing this as opposed to how you're going to do it is generally my approach cool thanks thank you hey guys this is a question here's more for Alex I'm really fascinated by the relation the creative relationship between you and Jason it seems that from the impression that the way you're talking was that he would for the sweets

would be he would create an of like an abundance of of tracks for one piece and then you would would you then have the creative control to decide what would work for certain scenes and things and layers and things like that yeah basically I think what you know we were in a in a stage where both of us were kind of trying to discover what the end solution of this would be you know it's when you look at something like this you kind of go oh yes obviously it should be that but there was so much kind of discovery that happened along the way that's where our where our relationship was most of the time was in this state of I have experience as a composer but I'm more interested in implementation personally for me composition is much more the personal thing but for Jason you know he knows a lot about a lot more about composition and but he also knows

he's worked on a ton of games and so there was this very there's a very good middle ground that we had there where I knew a little bit about his world he knew about my world and we were able to talk the same language and figure it out together because I think in the future composers for video games are going to be essentially what we were as a unit you know they're going to have a very good understanding of how the implementation is going to work and they're going to be composing within the game hmm so I I feel like that's the future for composers but this is this is kind of like the hybrid model that is a step certainly a benefit for two people to have that back and forth though yeah I think in any creative endeavor if you can work back and forth with somebody it's really good but I feel like you know when you look at movie composers now they there's a very clear understanding of that they're really supporting the emotion and you know

somebody like an ear Marconi for example I feel like a lot of his work is kind of like he's got a piece of music that he's putting in the movie and it's almost like oh you know the old video game style and I think he's like one of the best composers I'm not saying bad but it's like it's it's a it's a older style of doing it and so you know I think maybe he'd be relying more on directors to kind of tell him exactly what he wants or what they want as opposed to a lot of some composers now instinctively knowing you know how something should be so great thank you all right any other questions No thank you very much [Applause]