The

Interview

Lydia A game audio director is akin to a film sound supervisor — working with an Andrew audio team to create The audio of assassination — JOHN BROOMHALL everything needed speaks to Ubisoft’s respected audio director for the project ndrew is the talented and inspirational audio director behind the soundtrack of one of the planet’s A best-loved and most played game franchises, Assassin’s Creed. With more than 125m copies sold worldwide, and now in its 11th incarnation, the latest release, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, boasts best-of-breed everything — graphics, characterisation, story, gameplay — not to mention its vast quantities of sonically stunning AAA-grade sound, dialogue and music score, for which she is ultimately responsible. Described by her as “an incredible adventure”, this gargantuan production has dominated the last three years of her life (and at the time of writing, she’s still directing audio for extended downloadable content, dubbed DLC). Andrew’s interest in sound originated in music lessons, choirs and drama at school. She went on to study drama at Warwick University, where students enjoyed access to a small television studio set-up. It was there she found herself increasingly drawn to the technology / Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is set in ancient Greece and recording process itself, and began to see her future as perhaps being more behind the as a sound person, I think you’re always trying What type of gameplay does an Assassin’s camera than out front. After a post-grad film to find out more information about everything Creed title entail? and television production course in Leeds and a — the more, the better. That’s especially true in You’re exploring history through the medium of stint of location recording, she headed for the games as we have such significant schedule a third person action adventure game (third National Film & Television School to learn more dependencies with and on other departments person meaning you can see the character about sound post-production, subsequently — therefore, we really try to understand you’re controlling). You navigate incredibly working in film post until, one day, she took a everyone else’s jobs — the narrative team, the detailed worlds set in a specific historical period phone call from legendary game developer and animation team, and even the marketing team. — Victorian London, the golden age of pirates, publisher Electronic Arts that was to change We’re the spies in the camp. the American war of independence, the French the direction of her entire career. At that time, with things going well for her in film, a move to games was by no means a no-brainer. Intrigued, Andrew decided to give it six months. Seventeen years later, the London- born Brit finds herself in Quebec City at the helm of music, sound and dialogue production for a widely acclaimed game series — it turns out the combination of her skills, learning and early employment gigs were a perfect grounding for her current role.

What is an audio director for games and what does that mean day-to-day? It’s akin to a film sound supervisor — working with an audio team to create everything needed for the project. However, there are key differences — for instance I work closely with actors, directing voice-over sessions, plus I’m very involved with choosing and directing our composers (see interview with The Flight, Resolution V18.2), as well as setting the direction for sound effects and ambiences. Every day is different — I could be working with a sound designer on the combat system — talking through different weapon types, and the character’s movement sounds one day. The next I could be with my music supervisor giving feedback on a new delivery of cues and the next with our voice designers evaluating casting options or script tweaks. Somebody once said if you want to know where the game development’s at, ask the sound people because their work is touched by, and touches every other discipline. In general, / Andrew enjoys some virtual Hellenic sun from her room in Quebec

May/June 2019 / 27 We recorded tens of thousands of lines of speech and made tens of thousands of sound effects and ambiences

/ Genelec 5.1 monitoring is used in every Ubisoft audio room revolution and recently, ancient Greece. You’re train — each historical period provides its own combat, you might really like stealth gameplay, using parkour — you can climb anything, run challenges for sound. you might want to follow the central story or do across buildings, jump huge distances. You’re With our new game, Odyssey, we’re seeing a other side quests helping people or gaining finding out who you are and your personal lot of gamers playing for 70 hours or more, reputation. The player may choose to be in one story. Also, in the history of the brand, there’s sometimes over 100, because we’ve given the place for a very long time, so avoiding an on-going conflict between the Assassin’s player ‘open world’ freedom of choice in terms repetition is a big issue. Creed (your organisation) and the Templars. of exploring and gameplay style — sailing your You can choose many different combat styles, boat across the Aegean, riding your horse What’s fundamentally different about making you can sail a boat, ride a carriage or a steam around the countryside — you might really like sound for a non-linear videogame as opposed to a movie or TV production? There are two major differences for me. I work in-house with everybody who’s making the game. I think it was maybe like this in the old film studio system in the 1920s-1960s in Hollywood — working in the same physical location as the animators, the world-builders, the programmers, the texture artists, the writers… everyone. It’s an amazing education to speak to all those people and understand their work. When you’re working on a film, very often you are either split up in time from other people because of the way the schedules work, or physically the sound people are in a very different location from say, the visual effects people. The other major difference is the breadth of involvement — attending to every element of the aural experience — as I said earlier, working with the composers and casting actors and so on — it’s a very holistic approach and that’s what is very / If your name is Darius, you have a fight on your hands interesting about games.

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specific about that. Plus we do have technical our game, and these voices are giving you key restrictions — the size of the sound on the disk information and unfolding the story. So, first — the amount of RAM we’re using — the and foremost we make sure you can always amount of voices we can play at one time — all hear the voices, and then we build the rest of these things are taken into consideration. The our sound around that. Team members are restrictions are nothing like as onerous as the responsible for ensuring that their sound early days of gaming, but nevertheless you contributions are not too loud or too quiet as haven’t got carte blanche. and when they add them to the game, and we It’s very important to focus on pre-mixing. expect them to check the functionality too — in We do a final mix pass at the end of course, but terms of attenuation, positioning and so on. the reality is that from the very first sounds we Take the sound of say, a waterfall: there should put in we’re pre-mixing the game. We have be a correct feeling of attenuation and EQ levels that we’re trying to hit and we’re roll-off whether you’re a metre away or 100 constantly adjusting. There’s a lot of speech in metres away from it.

/ When ancient Greek triremes feature in your game, you’ll need a trip to the Mediterranean to record sound effects

How would you say creating sound for games is different from a technical angle? Fundamentally, the difference is that everything exists! It’s virtual but it’s real — a character in the game really is there in three dimensions in front of you! If you’re on your boat, you are on an actual virtual object — the front of the boat is in front of you and the back is behind you. So the way we use 3D or 2D, the way we use 5.1 or 7.1 or Atmos, entails a different approach — you’re not placing sound within that frame — you’re not sitting at a mixing desk saying, I’m going to place this sound in the right speaker and then move it to the surrounds. We might do that for some aspects but for physical things in the world — characters or objects or rivers, trees, whatever, they’re really there — the sound is emitting from those positions. You’re not track-laying — you’re dealing with sound in a fundamentally systemic fashion. It is in those objects and being emitted by those things. That’s a very fundamental difference for how we work in games. Also remember the player can choose what they do and when they do it. They can go where they want. You can’t soundtrack them second to second through the experience like a traditional track-lay.

So, you’re setting up replay systems and attaching sounds to these point emitters in the world and creating a world that in theory mixes itself — but it’s not that simple right? Yeah, you still need a direction. You still need to have taste at work. If you just throw a sound on everything and see what happens, it will probably be completely chaotic. It definitely requires an aesthetic direction and we’re very

May/June 2019 / 29 so people depending on the project timeline — some people might be just helping you in the last couple of months… We created four hours of music for the main game and more for the DLCs, but Jerome our music supervisor manipulated and extended the music stems into many, many more hours of music. There are ten original Ancient Greek sea shanties, and ten original songs — story songs for the game — and 50-ish pieces of source music for animated character musicians playing instruments in the game world. We recorded tens of thousands of lines of speech and made tens of thousands of sound effects and ambiences. The project included a research trip to Greece (wow, are the buzzing bees loud in Spring!) and various location recording trips including five days at sea on a galleon using everything from a small Zoom recorder, some contact microphones on the hull, an Ambisonics 5.1 surround microphone and shotgun mics dangling off the bowsprit to capture the sound of the boat cutting through the water. We also built a new interactive speech system and recording pipeline for managing complex branching dialogues and new systems / Andrew at the Yamaha Nuage console in the Ubisoft studio for handling the randomisation of ambient sounds, to max-out on getting aural variation How many people would be working on the working on voice and music, I don’t actually and lovely sonic detail in the game world. To sound of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and how know, but in terms of the in-house team — achieve that level of detail for such a big open much content do they make? mainly here in Quebec City but also in Montreal, world scenario you really need to think about If you take into account external studios Singapore and Montpelier, we were 17 to 25 or sound replay systems you can build to create

30 / May/June 2019 / Craft

Other software our sound designers are using all the time includes iZotope RX, the Waves If you want to know where the game Gold bundle, the Komplete bundle and Kontakt, Sound Forge and also Vegas for development’s at, ask the sound people making videos to help set the direction from because their work is touched by, and very early on, using concept art. touches every other discipline Final question: in a nutshell, what do you think makes for great game audio? I want the sound to be supporting and full immersion, because you simply can’t power of these tools means our turnaround illuminating the visuals, giving the player hand-make everything. It’s impossible. times and the amount of integration we can do feedback and a feeling of excitement or calm These bespoke tools plug into or work ourselves has grown exponentially. or intrigue or whatever… You can’t entirely play alongside Audiokinetic’s Wwise middleware — the game or tell the story with your eyes shut, the software which sits between our sound What kind of in-house studio recording but you can get a lot of information and designers and the game engine allowing us to facilities do you have? engagement from the audio. So, for me, it’s integrate audio components into the game Here in Quebec City, we have a series of about sound that transports me to another ourselves — not like the bad old days of relying studios, a main control room and voice booth, place — maybe in time, or a geographical on a programmer. You can put your sound into and we’re currently building a small foley area. place, or an emotional place — but it transports your middleware, set pitch, set volume, set We’ve got a Nuage room and a main mix room me there and then it supports me and gives me randomisation, set a sequence that the sound — that’s our largest room. Some members of an evolving experience — to me, that’s great would play in or set the spread of the sound or the audio team will also be working on game audio. the attenuation or the position of the sound. All headphones on the production floor at certain those things are possible through the times to closely integrate with other people GAMEOGRPAPHY middleware. If I decide that I want to add say an working on the same game feature as them. ambience into the game world, I can do it in We have Genelec 5.1 systems of various shapes Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (2018) Wwise — then I ‘build’ and I review. I’m very keen and sizes everywhere and we like RME UCX Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (2015) on encouraging people to not make the sound sound cards for the smaller sound design Assassin’s Creed IV (2013) with a blind ‘I’m just making a sound’ attitude, rooms. DAWS are Nuendo and (increasingly Assassin’s Creed III (2012) but to think carefully about how they’re going to now) Reaper, which is a very flexible tool for us Zubo (2008) integrate it, and how it will function in-game — — for instance, it’s plugged into our recording Battlefield 2: Modern Combat (2006) one feeds the other. The sophistication and pipeline in the new tools we’ve developed.

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