Many elements of games – action games, especially – are meant to grab you, to take you by the collar and shake you until you have no choice but to look them dead in the eyes. Graphics need to be immediately arresting. Individual attacks need to land like a sucker punch to the jaw. But sound is a little different. It provides gritty, sometimes gross texture, but you’re not meant to notice it separate from the greater whole. It should feel intuitively correct, or else you will clock it, and then the illusion will break. What all of this means is, it is somebody’s job to think really, really hard about how to perfectly recreate the sound of a human being getting stabbed.
At DICE in Las Vegas last month, I spoke to award-winning Sony Interactive Entertainment Foley artist Joanna Fang about what that entails in games like Ghost of Yotei, during which players spend a disproportionate amount of time stabbing people (and, occasionally, getting stabbed).
“The weirdest sound we had to make on a recent title was on Ghost of Yotei,” she told Aftermath. “We had to create the sound of somebody being stabbed with a spear. … There’s only so much you can do with grapefruit and shovels and axes. So [what sound designer] Adam Lidbetter and myself came up with is, we took a big piece of drywall from Home Depot, and we just started stabbing it with every sword that we had on the Foley stage until we found the perfect [imitates squelching noise] sort of sound, and that’s what made it into the game.”
But drywall and human flesh are pretty notoriously different substances, unless you’ve never moisturized. So how do sound designers transform one into the other, at least as far as our ears are concerned?
“A lot of layers,” said Fang. “We also had a layer of blood and gore, which is mostly grapefruits being ripped apart, chamois [leather], and then some extra secret sauce and processing on top of that to make it larger than life.”
Secret sauce, in this case, is figurative rather than literal, despite the subject matter.
“[The key is] realizing that even if you record something, that actual recording doesn’t convey fully what it must be like to feel that spear or that unctuousness of a puncture,” said Fang. “So I think a lot of secret sauce is hearing a sound and being like ‘OK, if I were to internalize this in my body, [what would that sound like]?’ Changing your perspective so you’re not just hearing it from the microphone’s perspective, but as if you were receiving the sound.”
Most Foley artists and sound designers, you will be shocked to learn, have never been stabbed. Getting a sense for what it should feel like, then, takes work, explained Sony Interactive Entertainment dialogue supervisor and sound editor Justin Wilson.
“It’s just kind of an instinct,” he told Aftermath. “It takes time in your career and lots of experimenting. For me what works great is immersing myself in entertainment and storytelling – different ways of telling a story and conveying feelings – to where it almost becomes subconscious. It becomes a natural direction that I’m just going to follow. … There’s so much that goes into it. So many little things that we’re doing to tell a story that you don’t even realize we’re doing; it just feels right when the emotion hits you.”
Recommended
Luke Plunkett
