So Winter Break's a Wrap!

Well that's all she wrote.  With UCI starting classes up again tomorrow, my 2011 Winter Break is officially done.  But with most certainty, I can say that it was the most productive and busy one I've had...ever.  I'd say I'll get back to you with a dedicated post per activity I did, but seeing my own track record, I'll just do decent descriptions right here right now in chronological order.

Motherlode

As the Fall quarter of school wrapped up, my Intro to Sound Design professor mentioned to the class that there was a Master's student looking for help on production sound for a short film.  Intrigued, I contacted the student, and got to be the boom pole operator for the shoot!  It was a great experience, being able to work with the whole crew, from director to ADs to grips to PAs, we had the whole hierarchy thing going on!  The project is another Master student's final thesis, "Motherlode", and will be shown in an art gallery I believe sometime later this year.  It was a lot of fun being the boom op, and I only had one instance of "CUT!!  ...boom was in the shot..." Oops... :)

Thunderfish Entertainment + Microsoft WP7 App Development

Remember that game company I co-founded last June?  Well we're making quite some progress :)  Thunderfish Entertainment is now about 20 people strong, has 3 games wrapping development, 2 more starting pre-production, and 82 submitted apps to the Window Phone 7 marketplace!  And it's those 82 apps that ate up a large portion of my first half of break.  After getting home from a nice trip to Vegas, I was alerted that the company had been given a special opportunity to go into Microsoft and learn how to build WP7 apps.  Naturally we took up the opportunity, and gathered all of our members, even searching for new prospective ones!  We spent 5 days total at the Microsoft Technology Center in Irvine, spending 10am-4pm creating purposely simple apps.  Our only criteria to meet, while working under a Microsoft employee's wing was to create 50 apps before 2012 hit.  And while we had a hard time getting started, we got better with each visit, and ultimately submitted 82!  So if you own a Windows Phone, go ahead and check them out.  Just remember that they are purposefully simple :)  In fact, we created Bonefish Studios as our mobile division to sum up all of our WP7 games.  Just remember that TFE isn't focused on mobile dev right now, and is much more focused on Xbox Live Indie Games!  That's where all of our real efforts go :)  Which you can read more about below under "Game Trailers".

If you could do me a favor too, as the Community Manager person for TFE, please like our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter @ThunderfishEnt!  :)  Building a fanbase is what we're looking to do now, and we'd be happy to have you in it!

Night Before Christmas

I'll just save the time, and reference you to the post I managed to write up on this project!  First one I had posted in months!

Christmas Ashes

Same goes for this project!  Here's it's own post!

Loss

Ah "Loss", my first experience with film sound post-production :)  At the beginning of last year, I met with an aspiring director/fellow student here at UCI.  He was looking for a guy to do the sound for his short film project!  I immediately offered my services, excited to work on a film project.  Before this project, I'd made lots of videos in the past, but more with me in the producer/editor's chair.  Simple neighborhood skate videos, stop motion ones, the occasional scripted video, documentaries for school classes, those kinds of things.  But this time, I get to do what I want to do as a career: film sound.  Dialogue editing, foley work, sound effects, mixing, collaborating with composers, all that good stuff :)

This truly is something that deserves its own post when completed, but for now I'll say that I've been doing a lot of footstep recording/editing, dialogue-aligning, and trying to make things scary with this horror/drama short :)  Because this is still a work in progress, if you want to stay up to date with how it's going, feel free to follow me on Twitter @BryanPloof!  In fact, for anything I'm up to I'd recommend following me there because I sure do tweet a lot more than I blog!

Game Trailers

As mentioned earlier, Thunderfish Entertainment has 3 games nearing submission to XBLIG:  Music Island, Space Debris, and Tarik's Tomb.  And in order to promote the games once they get approved, I made the trailers for two of them!  I'll link you to the trailers, but just be aware that even though they say "Out Now!", well...they're not yet haha :)  Let this just be a sneak peak because you keep up to date with what I personally am doing :P

Trailers: Music Island  Space Debris

Finally Own a 360

As Thunderfish Entertainment (TFE), is an XBLIG focused company right now, it was a little difficult to help my fellow co-workers when it came to debugging since I didn't own an Xbox 360.  However, problem solved now!  Now the proud owner of a 360 and a Kinect.  Really looking forward to experimenting with the Kinect in terms of little sound projects too!!

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Phew!  Long-winded I know, but that's what I've been up to this break!  :D  If this is all possible in just a month, I'm really pumped to see what can happen in all of 2012!  Happy New Year everybody!  And let's have a great one!

- BP

My Sound Design Challenge Entry on the Game Audio Podcast!

Five months ago, Dynamic Interference hosted its 9th Sound Design Challenge.  The SDC is a great monthly task that challenges the sound design community to craft new sound effects with certain restrictions in mind.  Past challenges have included creating a soundscape for the Northern Lights, vocalizing a yeti, and recreating Neo's scream from the Matrix.

SDC #9 was the site's first challenge focusing on game audio, meant to be at an introduction level so that anybody could pick it up.  I'd seen a few of the challenges come and go during the year, but never actually went through with participating in them.  When game audio popped up as the topic though, I realized I couldn't pass up the opportunity to compete and get feedback on my sound design/implementation skills in an audio middleware!  (Which I had never attempted before either!)  

The task required me to use AudioKinetic's Wwise (the ever-growing competitor to FMOD), and a batch of provided sound effects from Ric Vier's BlastwaveFX.  Containing waves crashing, thunder rolling, rain pouring, and people screaming, the goal was to create a dynamic scene that turns a calm, crowded beach into a raging thunderstorm that scares all the people away!

With the 2 week deadline set, I dedicated some time every day to learn Wwise, and audio middleware in general, in order to compete with the intimidating crowd of the Internet.  Who knew who could show up in this competition!  The sound design community is pretty large on sites like Dynamic Interference and DesigningSound.org!  Professionals could be attempting this too!

Much to my surprise, when the deadline passed, and I had nervously submitted my entry, it was revealed that only 9 people competed!  Which was weird because over 700 people downloaded the files to participate!  That alone made me happy that I at least submitted and accomplished something :)

I had a great time learning Wwise and doing my first project with dynamic audio in a middleware program.  It was fun seeing what I could do with the supplied sounds and mix things up so that I had variation in my beach thunderstorm!  After sorting the different samples of each element into their own random containers (wind, rain, thunder, people's screams, etc), I did my best to mix them in according to the user-controlled Time parameter slider.  This was definitely the most tricky part for me, since I'm so accustomed to linear audio.  The fact that holding the slider in a set position creates an infinitely long loop that can change at any moment by just moving the slider again amazed me!

So after working with the Time parameter, in which I created a span from 0-24 representing the hours of the day, I created Blend Containers to place in the timeline and be triggered at certain points.  For the wee hours of the morning I set it so that the storm was loopable from day to day, essentially representing the storm from the day before.  Then as the sun comes out, the storm fades away and people start coming to the beach.  People are happy, children are playing, and then BAM, thunder strikes and the waves start getting rough!  People are screaming and running away, and eventually we're left with just an empty beach and a raging thunderstorm.  

From there, through the power of parameter-based audio, it's all up to the user as to what happens next.  My set phases are established, but say for example, the player reverses time!  *Tape rewind SFX*  Now we're back to the afternoon, the height of people activity, right as the storm's about to hit!  Or let's fast forward and let the storm carry over to day two!  That's the funny part about game audio: once it's set up, the creator has no clue what the listener will actually hear since it's all run-time decision based.

My one last touch that I spent a while on, was my discovery of the volume, pitch, and LFE randomization knobs on the individual SFX instances.  This meant that from one audio file, I could get a whole bunch of different variations on it:  higher, lower, beefier, louder, softer, a whole bunch of choices!  I could also choose how often each instance played compared to the others.  Say there's a really loud thunderstrike that I like, but don't want it playing all the time.  I'll just give it less weight and problem solved!  :)

After the submissions and voting time period, it was discovered that another guy won.  Which was perfectly fine for me!  As long as I learn something out of the journey, I'm fine with whatever happens :)  And I believe that's key to sound design in general too.  It's very much a creative field, where anybody can always bring a new idea to the table, whether professional or amateur!

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Fast forward a whole five months to today, where I get an email saying that all the entries have been covered on the Game Audio Podcast!!  As soon as I read that and realized there was feedback waiting for me, I jumped right on over to their site (linked above) and started listening!  And taking notes of course!  :)

Since there were 9 entries (and actually a tenth was submitted later), I knew I would have to listen for a while in order to find my review.  They started off with the winning entry, then went onto the three semi-finalists.  Then another guy, and another guy, and another.  Seeing the progression of their evaluations started freaking me out since I hadn't come up yet!  O.O

Heart pounding, I finally heard "And Bryan P's entry" around 42 minutes in!  

Luckily they actually liked it!  :)  They definitely liked my use of randomization on the wave and rain SFX instead of using loops, and said it "helped sustain a unique sound across a long period of time"!  Woo!  :D

It then prompted their discussion of a key part of game audio, and how our goal is to create non-repetitive, expansive environments that can survive for hours of gameplay without the player realizing it's a bunch of low-level sound instances varied and reused over and over again :P

“In games, that’s what you’re trying to do.  You’re trying to take these base elements and do everything you can to stretch them out in a non-repetitive way for a long duration.”

The one thing I did get busted on were my transitions.  And that I can agree with.  Within each Blend Container on the track, I had a cool use of randomization and weighting to get a smooth flow.  However, moving between these containers, like from the morning storm fading into the mid-day calmness, I kinda just threw simple (and short) crossfades on.  So when moving through the "moment" quickly with the slider, it sounds a little jarring and unnatural.  Which is something I did forget!  So I got a compliment and a lesson learned!  Woo!  :)

That said, I'm really glad I participated in the Sound Design Challenge, and I look forward to doing more!  (Although I have missed the last two... -.-)

See you next time!

- B.Ploof