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Feature: Dave Steinwedel Designer Diary
Date: January 10, 2006
Source: IGN

Designer Diary

Dave Steinwedel takes us on a ride through the noisy life of a sound designer.

Screaming rockets, screeching zombies, howling winds, crackling fires, clanging swords—it's my job to create every sound effect you'll hear in Hellgate: London. It's also my job to integrate them into the game, record source material to design those effects, build and maintain our studio, and edit every raw recording into a useable library roll. Then there's the game mix, balancing every sound effect and piece of music to create a coherent soundscape. Since we have no tools for doing this, I also work with an audio programmer to create them. We also design ways to attach sounds to objects, to play sounds that don't correlate with an object, and we make systems to give me control over the parameters of each sound. Did I mention anything about music contractors? Oh yea, I also work with composers to create a fantastic score that keeps your heart pumping at high-adrenaline levels. That means designing a whole new set of music hooks, figuring out what type of score we want, translating our playback system from programmer-speak to composer-speak, and finally integrating the music coming back to us. Have I talked about cinematics? Dialogue?

No two days in my life are exactly alike. The audio lead at a small company has more hats than a Hatter and probably more mercury floating around too (liquid metal, I bet that sounds fantastic)! The only way to finish a game of this magnitude is to keep taking small steps every day. To give you an idea of what my life is like I've taken some snapshots from a few days over the last year.

August 2005
It's a warm summer evening, right around 9PM. I'm leaving my apartment, recorder over my shoulder, headphones atop my ears, and microphone in hand. Tonight's goal is to capture the sound of screeching train rails, preferably from an exterior position on the train. After walking three blocks to the subway station, I head four stories into the earth, pop my ticket in the machine, and slide through the gates, making sure my gear stays clear. An east-bound train pulls into the station. I hop on, aghast at how many people are still riding this late into the evening (humans are enemy #1 when it comes to capturing sound, they are loud—always talking and moving as noisily as possible at all times). I find the least crowded car and set up shop. A passenger wearing headphones moves close to me & the mic picks up his music so I move to a new spot. Passengers talk from time to time. Each conversation is effort I will have to spend later combing the recording to cut them out.

I get off just East of the bay. Too many passengers adorned that train to make worthwhile material out of it. I will have to wait. It's getting cold and I forgot to bring gloves. I collect the sound of trains passing through the station for an hour or so. Finally a somewhat empty train pulls in. I still don't have car to myself, but those onboard are quiet enough. I get some muffled screeching (the train car drowns a lot of it) and rattling around of the train.

I get off a few stops before Richmond. That's not a place I want to be walking around with the kind of gear I've got this late at night. I capture a few more trains going through the station and hop back on towards San Francisco.

Finally, I end up in a car all by my lonesome. Now I can get some great material. I am able to prop the end door open and stick the mic outside the car, aiming it directly where the train meets the rails. All the plastic rattling and muffled sounds produced by the car are gone. I have pure, unadulterated train-track screaming for 7 straight stops. My patience has paid off. I end up with plenty of material and then some. I slink into bed around 1AM. The only thing left to do is lug all the equipment back to the office in the morning.

December 2005
It's 10AM and I'm slugging through one of the most boring yet integral parts of my job: Mastering effects. This is often left to interns and new hires but since I'm the only audio man around even the lowliest jobs fall to me. This feels like all those busy-work dittos my US History teacher used to force on the class. I'm working on a set of wind recordings and all extraneous noises such as bird chirps, car bys, and my own movement need to be cut out and the remaining audio stitched together. Mostly, though, it's birds. Tweet, cut, stitch. Tweet, cut, stitch. This will be my main focus for the next day or two. To keep myself from going crazy I'll switch to other random tasks from time to time.

First break I talk to one of our programmers about hooks for melee impacts. We currently have no way of attaching a sound to a specific monster when they punch you. We go back and forth over how the hook should work and what data I'll need access to. Once the programmer has the gist of it I'm back to cutting away chirps. Another half hour passes by and I go to see my music producer. We discuss the next 6 months, work out what's going to be ready for music and how much should go in each area. That eats up a good 45 minutes and I'm off to attack another few hundred birds. Our lead designer comes in and tells me about a sound which is bugging him and why. I leave the birds alone for a few minutes while I pull it out of the game, "No need to replace it," he says. Sweet. Back to the birds.

At this point, I'm sick and tired of listening to these stupid birds chirp away every few seconds. But this is an exceptionally important (although time consuming) part of the sound design process. A track of wind with birds in it does me no good. There are no birds in post-apocalyptic London and if they litter the background track it will kill any sense of immersion the player has. Only after the extraneous sounds have been removed can I file them in the library or insert them in the game.

Around 3PM I can't take it anymore, I need a longer break. We've got animations for a new monster, Morpho Jr., who will be going in the game soon. I start designing his vocals, first pulling all the source material I think will work for him and grouping it by emotional quality. This pile is aggressive, that pile is deathlike, a third has whining qualities to it, a fourth confused.

The audio programmer stops in with questions about the music playback system. "How do you want to use stingers?" Out comes the white board on which we mock-up a music track. Eventually we decide on 3 ways to use stingers with the music. First, we can simply play a stinger over the existing song. Second, we can pause the song while the stinger plays. Finally, we can replace a certain amount of the song with a stinger. No sooner does the programmer leave than I'm informed that Morpho's animations have to be redone so I hold off on his sound for now.

I finish out the day with the birds, close to completion. Next morning I pick up where I left off, finishing the snip & stitch of the audio and filing it away in our library. Each cue (there are 11) is given a unique description, "Wind - Blustery - Blow - Heavy - Thick - Whistle - Light to Hard - off Rear View Mirror," and information about when, where, and who recorded it. I started out with 61 minutes of material. Two days and thousands of cuts later I finish with 38 minutes of usable audio.

May 2005, just before E3
I don't know what it's like outside. I haven't been out of the office in two days. Last night I slept in the recording booth. Tomorrow we start the final mix of our cinematic (which has ballooned from 2 minutes to 4 ½ over the last month). I have about 10 different ProTools sessions that all have to be consolidated, organized, and merged together. We also got new visual effects this evening—which means there's more material to cut.

I start off by consolidating a few of the easier sessions. This is the process where I take a session with 64-96 tracks of audio and flatten it all down to (hopefully) 10-20. Going back from this point is expensive and time-consuming. I want to make sure I give the mixer enough flexibility to do his job while not bogging him down with too much material. Some things are easy. I find a series of footsteps spanning three tracks. A quick re-record flattens them down to one. Other things are hard. The Templar Male's rifle is made of 4 elements. I'm not sure how each one is going to play against music—so I leave them separate.

It's getting onto midnight and I change pace for a while. The new visual effects include a body suit powering up. I have no time to record something new so I will have to rely on my library. This is why taking every raw effect and organizing them is so important. I need a useable effect NOW! I start my search with the term 'Telemetry,' which in my world refers all those sounds computer graphics make in the movies (you know, all the ones that never appear in real life). The first few things I pull are awful. They're from a commercial library and would have been good science-fiction effects 30 years ago. Can you say Theramin? After a few attempts I start to panic, realizing I may be screwed. I don't panic. Sometimes when I'm stuck, I'll listen to random sounds in my library for inspiration. While I'm poking around I see a description, "Camera - 35 Millimeter Canon - Shutter Clicks." Am I going to use camera clicks? No. But suddenly I'm reminded of that day last month when I was bored and decided to record my digital camera. Its beeps and flash flutters are perfect for this! Ten minutes later I'm done.

Now it's late in the night (or early in the morning, whatever you'd like to call it). I have all my sessions merged together and I'm beginning to balance them while making any final tweaks to my sounds. On the suggestion of a background artist I had a Redbull around midnight and hooked up a coffee drip to keep me going through sunrise. I'm in the zone. This gunshot is too loud, pull it down. This sequence has too many bangs to be discernible, some need to get cut. That zombie comes in from the left, pan his voice. The changes come fast and furious. Around 6AM I take a break and walk out to the pier, the fresh air is good. Around 9AM a producer agrees to take me home so I can shower and brush my teeth before heading to the stage to begin the final mixdown.

Every day I go to the office I'm prepared for almost anything to happen. The variety I am offered here is one of the favorite things about my job. Instead of being pigeonholed as a foley editor or a dialogue mixer I do absolutely every post-production sound job there is. Sometimes it's overwhelming but keeping my brain on its toes is a major key to making myself happy. All I ask in return is that we include some kind of pilot-able fighter jet in the game, "Hello, Colonel? Do you have any F-22's on the base? You do, great! I need a favor . . . "