Better
Sound Design
Each day I started with introducing
myself and asking the group what they would like to talk about. For
the most part this got things going, but if there was a lull in discussion
I had a list of topics to pull from.
Wed. May 6, 1998: We had a good mix of people ranging from beginners
to industry veterans. The discussion started with someone wanting to
know how to do the basics of sound design. Where do we pull the sounds
from and how much manipulation is involved before final output. There
were more veterans than beginners so it was easy to get multiple opinions
on how to create and modify sounds. This discussion went on for a while
then unfortunately turned into a discussion on why we don't have more
ram, and money to work with. One person in the group was very determined
to talk about why we need a union for sound designers. Fortunately for
me we ran out of time before it got to bad. We were able to talk about
what we can do technically to improve quality and still remain within
the ram and money limits. The main point was to just talk with the programmer
and decide where to cut and what things need to stay. Also, we discussed
how make do with a low budget, by making the most of the equipment we
have.
Thursday May 7, 1998: We had a lot of people this day, and again
a good mix experience. This time no one wanted to jump out and start,
so I did. I asked what tools does everyone use and what platform do
we prefer. Well, that was all it took, everyone jumped in after that.
We carried that topic for a while with input from a lot of the group
and came to the conclusion that mostly we had either high end systems
(Mac with ProTools) or lower end with Sound Forge with an AWE64. Once
that topic died I tried to stress the importance of having a porta DAT
and doing your own foley. Everyone agreed and we discussed some techniques
and stories of past experiences. A few of the higher level people told
stories about some high profile projects they had worked on, I think
stories like that are always fun to hear for the average person (including
myself). We then talked about what tools we use for file organization
and batch conversion. This one did not last as long, but I know a few
people learned about some software they were not aware of. We then had
a short discussion about who does audio to video and what tools do we
use. But this quickly moved to software DSP. A number of people were
using this on a daily basis and the rest of the group was very interested
in how good they really were and also how demanding (CPU) they were.
The ending topic was sequencers. There was some good discussion here
because of how many there are available and what platform (Mac or PC)
is better.
Friday May 8, 1998: I was really surprised by the turnout this
day. It was the last hour of the last day and I figured everyone had
left already. To my surprise a good amount of people showed up. This
day had a lot of inexperienced people with only a couple of experienced
people. We started with the basics of where to get sounds, what do we
do with them and the formats we deliver in. We also talked about how
important it is to talk with the programmer and designer of the game.
I'm really glad we hit this topic because I strongly believe it is very
important and I wanted to make sure everyone else agreed with me. I
found out that most people agreed, but often did not do anything about
it. But I think by the end of the round table we all agreed you must
be friends or at least be able to talk freely with the people you are
working with to produce quality work. Another topic we hit was IMA and
direct sound. People are already talking about it's use with music,
but no one is talking about the sound design benefits. A lot of the
people there were completely unfamiliar with it, so that was nice, to
at least enlighten some people. Whether they agreed it was useful or
not, it's always nice to share information with your peers. We had a
brief explanation of foley and it's importance and then moved on to
software tools and monitoring environment (Speakers and Room).
