After last weeks Foley recording I took the time out this week to edit and manipulate certain recordings. I found that I had made the mistake of recording these in mono, after advice from my lecture and reading the same advice in The Sound Effects Bible by Ric Viers I decided that some of the recordings would need to be done again in stereo, for example the footsteps to give them a better stereo field. I made a note of these and will re-record them next week in the Foley room, I will have hopefully seen the design for the virtual reality room from Rhys so I will be able to complete additional recordings during this session as well.  However some of the recordings will be okay in mono as they will be distant sounds coming through only one of the headphone speakers anyway. For example I recorded a flask being knocked over, I manipulated this taking away some of the bass and added reverb to make it sound distant.

This week I also decided to make a screaming noise that can be identified with the Alien that is supposed to be let loose in the room with the user. I thought that this would be a good way to let the user know that they are not on their own in the room. I created the sound, with advice from a Youtube video that interviewed the sound designers from the game Dead Space 3 ( more information can be found in my research section), I created the scream by merging and adapting a Pigs scream with an unknown animals growl which you can listen to below.

Both these sound were taken from http://www.freesfx.co.uk. To create a monster scream I needed to take these sound and adapt them. I added EQ to both, taking away the hiss on the second track. The EQ made both tracks have more bass and sound less animal like. I also added a heavy reverb using Waves Trueverb to give the scream a distant sound. You can hear the scream below

This week I managed to demo the virtual reality device, the demo gave me a better understanding of how the experience works and also the possibilities that are available, especially with sound design. The device offers a complete 360 view for the user, this means that the sound can be placed anywhere in the 360 field too. This is something I will have to be aware of during the mixing stage of the project.

During this week I have also started to record Foley. I have covered such areas like footsteps and other small sounds like a canister dropping. For the canister I used some floor tiles found in the Foley room and dropped a large flask onto it. I will manipulate this recording to give it a large sound. I recorded these sounds in the sound theatre and will make a lot of changes to the tracks in pro tools to make them sound more like something in a horror game. I will use waves gold bundle for this. However at this point in the project I don’t know the exact room layout due to the game still being in development. I will be able to advance more with these sounds when I have visual images of what the room will be like.

During the recording of the footsteps I used tile flooring. I may have to change this or manipulate the sound depending on what Rhys decides to use in the actual video game. This may be the same with some of the other sounds, however Rhys and myself have been communicating regularly to discuss room aspects.

During week 3 I took the time to start to developing ideas for the sound design of the game. Using the design drawing that Rhys provided for me I based my ideas around this. You can see in my research section of this blog that I have started to read about the sound design for the film Alien, during this research I found that the sound designers had developed a unique atmosphere for the rooms in the film. I started to apply this to my sound design and have started to trial out sounds that will help to develop the realism of the room that the game is set in.

Although I believe for this project that a lot of the smaller sounds will play a big part in scaring the user during the game, It is important for me to build up the main sounds like atmosphere and major room sounds in order to bring the game to life.

Below is an example of an alarm that I created using a alarm sound and mixing it will a synth plug-in. The alarm will be used in the game to signify to the user that something has been released into the room with them.

During the week coming up I plan to develop the room sounds to near completion and start to think about the sounds I want to create to layer up the sound of the game

During this week me and Rhys met up to start planning the project. Rhys brought along a hand drawn storyboard to help me get a better image of his design( see below). During the meeting we discussed what we both wanted to achieve with this project. We came to the conclusion that the overall aim of the game was to give the user a virtual reality experience that would scare them and hopefully make the user take the headset off before they complete the game. The experience is set in an abandoned operating theatre, during the game the user will walk around the theatre and will be able to interact with arrange of objects such as the operating table, cupboards and a wheelchair. When the user walks to the operating table an alarm will sound and an alien/monster will be in the room with the user. However the user will not be able to see the alien, sound will be used to convince the person that there’s something in the room.

To accomplish the goal of scaring the person using the device, sound will have to play a big part in the users experience, without sound the visual elements won’t have the same effect. Rhys gave me an example of a film that has inspired the game, the film is alien, released in 1979 and directed by Ridley Scott. Rhys described the use of sound in the film as letting the user know that there is always an alien on the loose. Even though you can’t always see the alien, a lot of the time you can hear it. This will be the approach I am taking with design for this game.

During next week I will be starting to develop sound ideas for the virtual reality horror game, during this time I will also be researching and learning techniques for horror sound design.

Game Room layout