Rodney Gates - Senior Sound Designer - 09/26/06
My name is Rodney Gates, and I am a Senior Sound Designer here at High Moon Studios. Essentially my duties consist of the design and implementation of audio that goes into our games, interfacing with the other teams to keep abreast of the many changes that can occur over the span of our sprints and releases, and keeping an overall bird's-eye-view on the project at hand. For this diary, I'd like to expand a little bit about the Foley work that we do here at High Moon.
Technically, this type of sound design isn't really Foley since that is usually performed to picture by Foley artists in the film industry, where they sync up the sounds they are making to the film projected on a screen in front of them. Yet we do go after a lot of elements in the studio in a similar fashion, and like Foley, some of what we use to design our sounds comes from unlikely sources. Need a face slap and can't find a willing subject? Get a hold of a good-sized piece of meat from the supermarket to smack and beat to a pulp. It's dirty work, but the resulting sounds usually far exceed what you might expect.
In the example shown in the video, I am crushing and ripping apart bell peppers. Peppers have a wonderful, lightly-wet tearing sound along with a crunchy hollowness which could simulate something like a chest cavity opening. This sound could also be used for a creature's limb being dismembered or even as a gunshot wound sound – the possibilities are many. Sticking to the produce category, other sound samples that we have recorded have come from heads of lettuce that were punched and shredded, tomatoes that were squished (and made us wince), and peanuts, potato chips and dry pasta that were crunched and splintered. Many of these have made it into cool audio that we have designed for hand to hand fighting in one of our games.
As we build up our database with all of this custom audio, we start to amass a lot of audio files very quickly that can be recycled in new and interesting ways. They help us steer clear of tired old commercial libraries that anyone can buy and give our projects a unique sound experience that the player hasn't heard before.
As our audio manager Gene Semel mentioned in his DevDiary, music may drive the emotional connection the game has with the player, but the sound is right there with you, feeding you the satisfaction of everything that you do.
Thanks for reading!
Rodney Gates
Senior Sound Designer
High Moon Studios
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