Assassin 39;s Creed 2 Voice Not Working
Liv Flynt
After doing this for a few years, I became very interested in what happened to the sound I was recording once I handed it to the sound editors, so I decided to look into sound post production. I attended the NFTS, where I studied audio post production, which lead me into film and television post production.
My entry into Game Audio came through a contact at the NFTS. One of my tutors was asked if he knew anyone who might be interested in working in games and I went for a meeting and, subsequently, an interview with Electronic Arts in the UK.
Since joining the games industry 14 years ago, I have worked on a wide variety of projects. This is one of the things I love about the game industry, there are a lot of different kind of projects on many different platforms.
Compare different games in the same genres. Or different iterations of the same game. We often play games as a group and then break them down and talk about them, as sound can have a very different effect on different people. We like to compare our thoughts, our reactions and how we might have approached the same scenario in a different way.
There are many different paths into game audio and many different skills needed in game audio. As some teams only have one audio person or a very small audio team, being flexible is important. Try to develop skills and interests in several areas. For example, can you edit music and also create SFX? Can you work in both sound creation and sound implementation?
Creative projects, but made quickly. The game jam idea, where ideas are tested, iterated on and produced in a short time frame, can be a great learning tool for beginners and also for experienced game developers.
London in the Industrial Revolution is a very rich location for sound and one that needed a lot of research. At the beginning of the creative process for Assassins Creed Syndicate, we talked about the story, the settings, the characters and the era.
Along with the rest of the game team, we talked about what was important in this era and what we felt we wanted to focus on in the game. Then members of the sound team took on different areas of the audio and started to research them, using books, the internet, sound libraries, music archives, brain storming and discussion.
We throw a very wide net at the beginning, as you never know where a good idea or piece of information will come from and then we start selecting and narrowing down our topics, so we can research them in more depth.
We have a large number of horses and carriages with a lot of variation in carriage type. There are also steam trains running constantly around the city, including, for the first time, a moving player hub on a special steam train.
For example, Ubisoft Singapore worked on all the boats for the Thames River, Ubisoft Annecy were responsible for the player Hub: The special steam train, and Ubisoft Quebec City with help from Ubisoft Montpellier, did live recordings, looked after the systemic steam trains and the horses and carriages.
Everyone started by looking for reference material, sound recordings, videos, films, written descriptions. This helped us to get the correct historical context, and to understand the difference in the mechanical construction between a Landau Carriage and a Growler, or between the different parts of a Steam engine or a steam boat.
This also helped us to make the technical design for the audio, which is the basis for any kind of systemic sound design. We needed to decide what kinds of sound we wanted to hear, what we want the player to experience, what the layers were, and therefore how we needed to construct and implement these assets to work in a totally systemic way.
Considering how a train sounds when you are standing on the roof in comparison to hanging off the side near the wheels, how the different types of open wagon will sound, how the train reacts to cornering, going up and down inclines, and stopping in stations are just some of the building blocks we are considering.
Trying to work on multiple different vehicle types without a strong systemic approach would make the project almost impossible to complete. You need to know that the sound will react correctly in any different situation, that it will work over time and that the differences between different vehicles and AI vehicles in different situations are as clear as possible for the player.
After looking at the reference material available, creating some placeholder assets, and testing our technical design, we knew that we wanted to do our own recordings and find more recorded material to really give the player a great mixture of historical accuracy, gameplay feedback and fun.
This meant finding out where it was possible to record steam trains and boats from the period and horses and carriages. We also talked to other sound people within Ubisoft to see if they had heard of any new recordings available in libraries.
Recording new sounds not only gives us fresh material to work with and the chance to plan out what we really need from the recording sessions, it also gives us the chance to check our research and adapt our creative and technical sound design.
Carriages, horses, and trains were recorded in France, Ubisoft Montpellier. Annecy got together to do train recordings so that Annecy had unique sounds for the player train, whilst Quebec City focused on the creating and implementing the systemic trains.
The horses and carriages were a mixture of the new recordings done by Ubisoft in France and we licensed a brand new library of carriage recordings that was in the process of being put together. One of our senior sound designers here in Ubisoft Quebec, Steve, focused on editing and implementing all the sounds to create this incredibly rich experience of driving around this crowded Victorian city.
We went through the process of choosing our composer, listening to music they had written, considering their previous work, and then approaching them to send us tracks they felt would work with our brief.
We had some amazing tracks sent back to us and we listened to them with our Creative Director and our Executive Producer. We were very happy when we had a unanimous decision to work with Austin Wintory.
Austin, Christian, and I talked about the game in detail, the locations, the characters, the story and the missions. We talked about the music of the time and about how we wanted to reference the source music we were choosing for the game, in the score Austin would compose.
The planning of the source music was very important, we did a lot of research into the era and we worked with a professor of music in the UK, Professor Derek Scott, who supplied us with information like; what the most popular tracks of this era and this year were, or what kind of music was listened to in different places and by different classes.
Austin wrote the music as suites, as you play through the game you progress to the next suite, highlighting different instruments of instrumentation to support the changes in the story line and the characters.
The combat music and the mission music changes as you progress through the game and changes based on which character you are playing. Austin drew on music themes from the time but without there being a feeling of pastiche.
Murder ballads are a genre of music that has origins in folk music. Songs were written about notorious or important people, or moments in history, and these songs were then sung and handed down. The ballad of Sam Hall, which we used as the borough theme for Whitechapel, sits within this genre.
Getting the accent right was a key focus for us. We were very careful with our casting to select native British accents within Canada as well as working with actors in the UK. We worked with dialogue coaches and historians to make sure our diction and text was accurate to the period in order to keep the player immersed in Victorian London at all times.
There are 4 pillars of voice recording that happen for the project. The script and narrative text is primarily recorded in Motion Capture studios with actors interacting in real-time. We record these lines with a boom microphone and try to keep the process as close to a film set as possible in order to get the most amount of emotion and drama from each scene.
AI and gameplay lines are recorded in isolated sound booths, and we need to pay careful attention to the projection and intonation of each line to make sure that the final voice will feel natural within its intended environment. Script writers and voice designers consult regularly to compare notes and assure that the actors have all the information they need to deliver their lines.
Crowd life is an extremely important ambience feature which gives life to the setting. Shipyards, marketplaces, palace balls, are all carefully decorated with people doing and saying things representative of life in Victorian London. In these situations the animations are carefully blocked out in advance and scriptwriters work with the image to write appropriate dialog. The actors similarly must match their voice to the image and work with the video in the sound studio where they record.
We started by identifying the structure of an animation set and looking at what all the parts of that animation were, every variation, and how they link together is important when considering the sound design.
Then Romain would test this system with placeholder sound so we could refine it and plan the sounds we needed to record. This allows us to make sure we get everything we need in our Foley sessions, planning really is important.
Our goal was not to just recreate an idea of the authentic sound of a Kukri knife but also to give this weapon a personality and to support the personality of the character using it, and what their style of movement is like.
Then it comes to fitting all of this together and making sure that the sounds sit within the image correctly, that the panning, volume, filters are all set, and behaving in a way that makes the fight exciting and readable for the player, and ensuring that they get the best possible feedback.
e59dfda104