GDC 2013 Wrap-Up

I was lucky enough to attend this year’s 2013 Game Developers Conference as an IGDA Scholar!  What started as answering a couple short questions on how I participate in the game community, and what my career goals were, ended up becoming the most eventful, busy, and memorable week of my life.

The scholarship included an All-Access Pass to the conference, scheduled tours with local companies in San Francisco (Three Rings Design and Double Fine Productions), and a pairing with a mentor in the industry to guide me throughout the week (Dren McDonald!).

So, along with the other 19 Scholars from around the world (ranging from Australia to Scotland to Chile to San Francisco), I embarked on a very unique career opportunity.

As seven days is a lot to recap, I’ll cover the highlights of the week, even though there were a lot!

SUNDAY

• The conference is traditionally held in San Francisco, a nice convenience for a Southern California native.  So after 8 hours of driving with two of my friends, we arrived at the famous city, parked the car for the whole week since we wouldn’t be needing it, and set out on foot for the hostel.
• After we checked in and got settled, we booked it off to the Moscone Center, where pass pick-up was still available for the next 5 minutes.  After jogging to the wrong part of the Moscone, we sprinted over to the correct side, got our passes, and then I rushed off to meet up with the other Scholars!
• Finding the others in the food court wasn’t that hard, as we had all added each other on Facebook in the months leading up to GDC.  We got our debriefing from Luke Dicken, Heather Decker-Davis, and Molly Maloney, the heads of the IGDA Scholarship program this year, mingled with each other for a bit, and then we were left to ourselves, as our organizers had other places to be that night.  Confused for a moment, we didn’t want to turn in for the night as it was only 8pm or so.  So, in true GDC fashion, we headed off for drinks!
• By the end of the night, the Scholars got to know each other a little more, and we were all excited for the events about to start.  Wrapping up the night, my phone died, and I was left to navigate my way back to the hostel with no directions.  It was quite a rush trying to get back at 1 in the morning, and avoiding the Tenderloin, which my hostel bordered!

MONDAY

• Monday morning started early, as I couldn’t stay asleep.  I was too excited thinking about the day to come!  After meeting some new, international, friends over breakfast in the hostel, I headed off to the Moscone Center to meet up with the Scholars for our first studio tour!
• The tour of Three Rings was awesome, given to us by the CEO himself.  In the conference room, he told us the history of the company and ran a little Q&A.  We were then shown the main office, and then a phone booth.  In fact, it was a TARDIS from the Doctor Who series.  We then walked through the TARDIS and ended up in a whole other wing of the office!  Here there was more desks, meeting areas, a full bar, and a hidden room behind a bookcase!
• Right after the tour we headed off to a Scholars/Mentors lunch, where each pair would finally meet in person.  Funny enough, my mentor and I had already met at last year's GDC! It was a pleasure to have Dren McDonald, a sound designer, composer, and the Director of Development for the Game Audio Network Guild, as my mentor for the week!  Thanks Dren!
• After the lunch, I hung out with Dren as we went to see some of the Game Narrative Summit talks, one given by Warren Spector!  Then, we ran into a friend of Dren's, and he introduced me.  Turns out it was John Romero, creator of DOOM!  We talked for a bit, and I'm happy to say that he found my last name entertaining, especially for a sound guy :)
• We saw a few more talks, chatted over coffee, ran into more friends of his, and then decided to meet up with the rest of the game audio crowd.
• A quick aside: If you're reading this, you know how often I use Twitter, and how the #gameaudio hashtag is used across the whole game audio community.  This is a community that I’ve grown attached to, and really enjoy chatting with!  Because we're all spread out across the world though, we don't see each other in person a lot.  In fact, GDC is the most probable place where we will see each other next.  Therefore, I was really interested in meeting up with the guys I've been talking to for the past year, and people I've interviewed for the Sonic Backgrounds interview series on Creating Sound.  Heck, even meeting the Creating Sound team in person was on my to-do list! 

• We checked Twitter and saw that audio guys were beginning to meet for drinks, so we headed off to meet them!  I finally met Alex Saba (from Canada!), and a new friend, Chris Trevino, that knew who I was just from my Twitter activity.  Here starts the craziness that is networking through Twitter.  I had never met Chris before, but when I introduced myself “Hi I'm Bryan,” he responded with “Oh, you're Bryan Ploof!”
• Humbled and surprised, this was not the only time this happened during the week-long conference.  From people I've talked to many times, to some who I've only interacted with once, people knew who I was, either from my face, last name, or my interview series!  So crazy!
• Drinks then led to dinner, and then even more drinks :)  Met so many audio people this night, that I felt right at home.  I'm normally the sole audio guy where I'm from!
• One particular highlight of the night, and goes to show that you never know who you'll run into during GDC, was Ann Kroeber, the famous film sound designer!  Such a nice lady!
• Another fun fact about this night was that it was the first time DesigningSound.org and CreatingSound.com were represented under the same roof!

TUESDAY

• Tuesday morning I woke up early to explore the city, and then headed off to meet the Scholars for our second studio tour: Double Fine Productions!  The tour of Double Fine was awesome, with so much concept art, fan letters, and more posted on the walls. It was also funny to walk around an office that seemed familiar from all the Kickstarter videos!  We listened to talks from a technical director, lead programmer, designer, and Mr. Tim Schafer himself!  It was a very cool morning!
• Then, after a brief lunch with the Scholars, I went around to see as many talks as I could. Had to make use of that All-Access Pass after all!  So, even though the main conference hadn't started yet (seriously!), I went to more of the Narrative Summit, and one Indie Game Summit talk. It was very cool to go to talks that were out of my area of comfort!
• Tuesday night was a game audio dinner that had been planned before the week began.  Was not expecting it to have such a huge turnout!  Met so many more audio people that night (even Stephen Schnapps, who happened to be at the same hostel as me)!
• And as you may guess, dinner led to drinks :) At a bar called Foley's nonetheless! A perfect place for an audio guy hangout!  Except for the dueling pianos that started playing, making it so that we couldn't hear each other speak... We ended up moving outside to the streets of San Francisco, where we talked between the intermittent jackhammers instead.  So many more Twitter-familiar faces and new friends that night!

WEDNESDAY

• Once we got to Wednesday, I'll admit, I was dragging a bit. Three days of hanging out with people, and we were just finally getting to Day 1 of the official conference! To top off the morning, my wall socket had died in the middle of the night, so my phone only had a quarter-charge!
• Heading off to the Flash Forward, where all speakers give a 1 minute pitch of their talk, I quickly charged my phone in my friend's laptop. I wasn't about to attempt a day of GDC without my phone!
• From here, the day moved along quickly, starting with Hideo Kojima unveiling Metal Gear Solid V (and seeing a stunning talk on the photorealistic FOX Engine), to the Sound Design Demo Derby (which proved to be a very educational experience!), and more audio talks!
• After all the talks was the IASig (Interactive Audio Special Interest Group) Mixer, where I met even more audio guys. I was stunned, meeting more and more audio-focused people every night! I'm so used to the audio community being so small, that it was heart-warming to see so many people!

THURSDAY

• Thursday is when my days started to meld together, as I was in a confused trance of “How long I have I been in San Francisco?” Every time I checked Facebook it seemed like the world before GDC was ages ago.
• After some great audio talks in the morning, I headed over to the IGDA Town Hall meeting, and then the Expo floor after that. I finally met up with Sonic Backgrounds interviewee Stosh Tzuyinski, and went to the RAD Game Tools and FMOD booths to catch up with friends I made last year.
• Thursday night was the 11th Annual GANG Awards, which I got to help set up! Met even more audio people, and saw Journey's Austin Wintory take home quite a bit of awards!
• After the awards was the GANG Awards after-party, which brought back fun memories of last year.  The party was awesome, besides the fact that I forgot to buy a raffle ticket...and there were some amazing prizes. Next year!

FRIDAY

Photo Credit: Izzy Gramp

• The week truly had become a blur by Friday, and the hostel was starting to feel like home.
• I kicked off the morning by going to a talk in the Design Track, and it blew my mind. The talk was on the UI of the whole Dead Space series, and it was amazing to see the Lead UI Designer talk about how and what they did to create the user interface. The part that blew my (and the rest of the audience's) mind, was the fact that all of Dead Space's UI was particle effects, and not static images!!
• After lunch and the IASig Town Hall meeting, I saw more audio talks, one of which was on FractOSC and its use of PureData!
• By the time 5pm rolled around, the talks had all officially ended, some people had already started heading home, and it was time to do the final meet up with the Scholars. We took our official group picture, and said goodbye to some of the group who had to head out. The rest of us that weren't leaving until the next day hung out for a bit, and then I left to meet up with Dren, for a great mentor/mentee wrap-up over some tea!
• I then headed out to meet up with the rest of the Scholars, who were hanging out at their hostel playing card games. We spent the rest of the night doing so, chatting, laughing, and making programming jokes. When the night came to a close, we said our goodbyes, and called the week a wrap.

SATURDAY

• Saturday morning I took advantage of my last day in the city, and went to the Embarcadero to take pictures.  I watched a street musician jam out to an awesome bucket/pot drumset, walked through a farmer's market, and snapped a nice Instragram of the Bay Bridge to wrap it all up.
• After a 9 hour drive back down the state, I made it home, and collapsed in my chair, exhausted, but happy with the whole week :)

A huge thank you to the IGDA Scholarship program, Luke Dicken, Heather Decker-Davis, Molly Maloney, Sheri Rubin, Dren McDonald, and everybody else who made this amazing opportunity possible!  It was such a great week, and I look forward to seeing everybody again in the future!

Age in Review - 21

Yesterday I turned 22 years old, and thought it would be cool to look back on what I accomplished while I was 21!  It was my first full year giving sound design my full attention :)  So here's a list!

• Use Twitter on a professional level for networking
• Participate in the UCI Video Game Development Club's 2012 Winter Game Jam
• Submit a commercial to Doritos Crash the Super Bowl 2012
• Collaborate with USC game developers for their senior project, Clockwork Zombies
• Attend the 2012 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA
• Release Music Island on Xbox Live Indie Games
• Field-record Porsche time trials at a racetrack
• Take graduate level course "Creating Sounds from Scratch" at UCI
• Job-shadow Empty Sea Audio's Mark Camperell for the summer
• Release Mage Cage on Xbox Live Indie Games
• Join Creating Sound as a contributing author
• Start the Sonic Backgrounds interview series on Creating Sound
• Make a music video out of my car (Altima Audio)
• Make a music video out of my microwave (Microwave Rave)

 It was a really fun year!  And it's so cool to think that this is just the beginning :)  I'm so young in the #GameAudio field!  It's been an honor to meet and network with sound people from across the world, and I look forward to all the fun adventures to come with you all!  :D

Microwave Rave

This semester, I'm taking a class called "Music, Technology, and Computers".  It's been on my radar since before freshman year, since I know one of the two professors who teaches it, but it's taken me until now (my fourth year) to finally have the time for it!  

Ironically, with all the years between starting college and now, I've already learned a lot of the content :P  At least on the "How to use Audacity" or "Did you know you could do X to sound?" levels!

The new topics I really like though are the history of experimental/electronic music!  From Edison's phonograph to the theremin, to the Italian Futurists, Pierre Shaeffer, Les Paul, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varese and more, it's so cool to know that my quirky take on music falls into a rich history of similar minds!  I was so happy when I discovered that "music concrete" was an actual genre, and has been around since the 1940s!

Now, on the first day of class, my fellow classmates didn't seem to have the same enthusiasm.  Upon watching the documentary "Modulations: Cinema for the Ear", which covers the history of electronic music, they laughed and snickered when they saw a self-described "sound artist" walking around his kitchen with a microphone, recording his microwave and other appliances.  I thought it was awesome, but I was clearly alone!  

In the class discussion after the video, the overwhelming opinion was that "A microwave cannot be a musical instrument."  

So, that lit a fire in me, and I felt motivated to prove a point.  

Cue the weekend, and me making a music video out of my microwave!  :D  I grabbed my H4n and Rode NTG-2, and recorded as wide a variety I could from the microwave.  Then I called up Acid Music Studio, created a little one-minute rhythm from all the samples, rendered it out, tossed it into Vegas Movie Studio, and did a whole bunch of short video cuts from the clips I recorded on my phone, and voila:  music video!

Also a fun fact:  The "rave" of Microwave Rave comes from the fact that the documentary we watched talked about 133 BPM being the rate rave musicians used to keep the clubs dancing all night long.  So, I decided to keep the night going...with my microwave :P

HS Drumline Cadence Project

Every day of my high school career centered around drumline and marching band.  From 2005-2009, I spent all my time with fellow musicians, as we practiced throughout the year to become the best band (in Fall semester), and drumline (in Winter semester).

And at the core of every year (even the year I stuck around to coach), were Friday night football games! Our football team wasn't exactly spectacular, but to gather the band in the stands on a weekly basis, it continually built a great sense of community!

Each football game always started with the drumline playing the cadence, and bringing the football team up into the stadium.  Keeping the cool, straight, badass demeanor, combined with the jocks hooping and hollering right behind us, always was an absolute thrill.  Even thinking back to it now, it sends a chill down my spine.  That cadence and the team's arrival signaled the "It's time" flare, and officially began my town's Friday night game!

The cadence also signified the end of the night, as we played it as we left the stadium, with the entire 100+ person band double-filed behind us.   We played it all the way back to the band room, and then circled up (just band people now, no football team or the public), and broke out into a tribal jam, rocking out in an endless rhythm 'til we got cut off by the director!  :)

All of this tradition, hype, and energy, is what drove me to create my drumline's cadence in MIDI.  I wanted to accomplish a few things:

1. Find a project to get used to Pro Tools 10 (Which I now own!)
2. Use Virtual Drumline 2, a library that I've had for many years, but haven't actually used
3. Improve my MIDI composition skills
4. Share the final product with my old high school friends

Everything worked out great, and I loved how the final product came out.  What made me even happier though, was the response that came from my high school alumni friends!  When I shared it on Facebook, I had people coming out of the woodworks to like and comment it!  

As far as I know, there has never been a live recording of this timeless cadence, that has been marched for 17+ years!  All the alumni kept mentioning how nostalgic it was and that it brought back old memories :)

The project only took about a week, and I had to contact a few old friends to get the sheet music for the snare part, since I only marched bass and tenor drums.

Overall I like the product (it sounds great with a subwoofer), but love the response from my fellow alumni even more!  It's amazing how a short piece of music can bring together so many people :)

Go Aliso!

- Ploof

Altima Audio - A Sound Guy's First Car

When school wrapped up, and the summer of 2012 began, I made a purchase a long time in the making.  I bought my first car, a 2005 Nissan Altima!  It's served me well so far, and has taught me lessons in gas prices...

Amongst the other things I've been doing so far this summer (which really merits its own post eventually), I had the urge to revisit my old Rhythm of Life videos.  The style of these videos is what started my interest in sound design and all other forms of sound.  But what the old videos lacked back in 2005 (huh, didn't realize the videos are as old as my car!), was that they both used stock sound effects.

Therefore, I set out to make a sound-effect-based music video that only used sounds I recorded myself!  And what better object to use than my new car!  I grabbed my H4n and Rode NTG-2, headed out to the driveway, and recorded a whole bunch of foley sounds.  Car door slams, key turns, emergency brake pulls, A/C dial rotations, clicks, flips, windshield wipers, beeps, all sorts of fun interfacey stuff!

I then headed out with the only digital camera on hand, a Casio Exilim 7.2MP, (I'm a sound guy, not a video guy :/), and filmed the objects I had been using to make sounds.

Then began the process of composing the song!  Choosing what sounds to use as what instruments depended a lot of what frequency the sound had.  For example, car doors made good bass kicks, while turning a key in the door made for a good hihat.  I then created the song in ACID Music Studio.  It went through a couple revisions, but I finally settled on something I liked, and was short enough so people would watch the whole thing.

So many "instrument" instances!

Finally, the grueling process of video editing arrived.  When a video depends so much on visual sync, down to a frame-by-frame level, things get very irritating.  Fast.  I spent a lot of my time zoomed in, staring at the .WAV file that I was syncing very small individual video files to.  And not only did I have to place them correctly, I very occasionally had to speed them up so that the actual motion coming before the percussive hit could be seen!  A lot of these clips are sped up to the max 400%.  That would be the occasional blurring if you see it.  (Also, uploading a video to Youtube can only make syncing harder...)

So. Much. Editing.

Overall, I'm glad I got back in the rhythm video mood for this quick project (2 weeks).  "Altima Audio" (stylied as ALTIMA_audio to mimic the Nissan style) is my first step towards making videos like these with my own recordings.  And since field recording is something I rather enjoy, there may be another one of these coming along at some point :)  Just after a break from the video editing...

- BP