One of my first “field trips” at Respawn was heading out to Wes Thompson’s Piru Rifle Range in Piru, California to record audio with our fantastic sound guy, Ed Lima. Ed has been doing videogame sound for 12 years now and worked on projects like Infinity Blade, RAGE, Borderlands and Doom 3 among many others. Also on-site was a large chunk of the Respawn staff and you can check out our pictures from the day throughout the interview:

 

After our trip, I sat down with Ed to ask some questions about his background, the most challenging aspects of capturing sound for games and why he hates our copying machine so much:

Abbie: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve recorded in the past?

Ed: Well, it’s always “squishies”. It’s always the sound of stuff squishing or splatting. We had a mock-up of a thing that was wet and it involved me getting 3 or 4 packets of this cream of chicken soup and mixing that with water so that it was really thick and starchy and then I decided that I needed some pretzels in it to get some crunch so I spent about an hour punching this big bowl of nasty, stinky, starchy chicken soup with pretzels pieces in it into a microphone so I could get “squish crunches”.

Abbie: Awesome. Or gross.

Ed: I’ve been through a lot of mac and cheese, too.

Abbie: So I imagine you have to go out and find your own weird ways of getting sounds frequently.

Ed: Yeah, back in Dallas I used to go to parks a lot. Parks in Dallas always have those weird concrete bunker bathroom things and for whatever reason the air conditioning and fans in them sound like turn of the century industrial machines so I have a lot of…

Abbie: …time spent in public bathrooms with a microphone? That doesn’t sound weird or creepy at all.

Ed: Yeah. But you get a lot of real heavy industrial machines stuff . Those always sound really good for refineries and computer rooms and those sorts of things because they’re loud and clanky and awesome and as a gamer you walk into those spaces in a game and you get a strong sense of being someplace rusty and not well managed and low-tech.

Abbie: Any other strange or notable trips?

Ed: A lot of the stuff is sort of mundane. You put on some big hiking boots and stomp through the grass to get those kinds of sounds. I’m trying to think of some of the stuff I did on Infinity Blade. Definitely a lot of growling and screaming, those sorts of things, and pitching them down for monsters. A lot of my friends helped me out with doing that stuff. Car recordings are fun. You generally have to do a lot of crazy stuff for that, tape microphones to the car, run it in neutral for 20 minutes at 6000 rpms just burning through the engine and burning through gas and covering your ears. Of course, for this gun shoot I had to regularly run down range and adjust the recorders and hope you guys didn’t shoot me.

Abbie: Yeah, we were thinking about it. But we didn’t. (ed. note: we love Ed and would never shoot him or do anything unsafe while working with weapons. We take gun safety very seriously.)

Ed: The fun about [recording audio] is there is no right answer. There is no “this is how you get this type of sound”. Everything is problem solving and improvising. You know, you’ll come with us on the future gun shoots where we start shooting through traffic cones and vacuum cleaner hose to get all sorts of weird reflections and things like that. That will be stuff that people say is really unsafe for us to do but we’re not afraid.

Abbie: Have you worked with animals in the past?

Ed: Animals? Yeeeaaaah. Animals are cool. Zookeepers will tell you that the best ways to record audio for animals is basically to taunt them with food. Which is as wise as it sounds. Bears and big cats…

Abbie: You just tie some steaks to yourself?

Ed: You basically dangle the steak in front of them and then they get all riled up about it and you have to be johnny-on-the-spot with the mic in your hand right next to their mouth. So you’re like “steak steak steak” and they go “RAWR” and that’s what you capture.

Abbie: On the other side of the cage bars, right?

Ed: Yes. Definitely. With a very long boom pole. So you don’t accidently get snacked on. I’ve tried to do a big cat record in Dallas. Problem was I did it in February, that was the time when I could get away from working on the game long enough. Dallas is kind of an icy cold place in the wintertime and the animals don’t really play or participate, so I wandered an empty zoo for the most part. It was weird and post-apocalyptic. And definitely didn’t get much that was useful.

Abbie: Wild animals just don’t care at all.

Ed: So that kind of sucked. I haven’t been seriously hurt or injured or threatened or anything like that in my life. I mean, I’ve hung out of a moving car or two, you know. That’s cool. One hand on the mic, the other on the luggage rack. But thankfully, and thanks for jinxing me on this project now, I haven’t been seriously damaged or hurt.

Abbie: I’m sorry. If anything happens you can blame me.

Ed: You can be the first one to sign the cast.

Abbie: Excellent. I’m writing “first!” on it. Now on a more serious tack: How did you get started doing audio for games?

Ed: Well, I actually went to school for music. I went to Berklee College of Music, I went to their film scoring program. Finished at Berklee then went to work at a music software company for a few years. One of my office-mates there left to go work on an RTS called Empire Earth and offhandedly I said”if you need any music, let me know” and he said “yeah, we do” and so I just sort of fell backwards into my first game scoring job. I did all the main menu music and victory/defeat stuff for Empire Earth then pretty much stopped doing anything besides game stuff. I’ve been doing game audio for 12 years.

Abbie: So you do music AND sound effects.

Ed: Yeah, I started as a composer and then ended up doing double duty with sound design. Now I do voice direction and casting and writing and stuff so one skill set sort of grows into others.

Abbie: You do everything!

Ed: Well, I think it’s important to be accountable for everything that you hear. I feel like that’s kind of where my skill set lies. So I do try to be responsible or accountable for everything you hear in a game. That means sounds design and music and voice acting.

Abbie: What’s different about doing game v.o. than say doing v.o. for a film or animated feature?

Ed: You can definitely see the difference between actors who play games or understand games versus those who do not. And it’s generally not in the dramatic stuff, it’s in like, pain sounds. Non verbal v.o. When you explain to somebody “now you’re going to jump over this half height barricade and you’re going to do it 6 times” you can tell right away. The actors who get it go “oh okay, so I’m like, rolling up and pressing x.” I had someone tell me that once. And they get it right away. They know how to act with their body to get the right “huff”…I’m touching my torso right now because a big part of it is pushing your stomach in. Same is true for melee attacks or getting hit or whatever. Voice actors who understand those things, that they’re not really tied to a linear narrative, that it has to be a self-contained cool little sound always sound better. For the actors who don’t get that, you can still get great sounding performances out of them. You just have to do it with a little more direction.

Abbie: Do you ever get great stuff out of outtakes, mistakes and improv?

Ed: Absolutely. I was just talking about this to my voice actor friend the other night. There is a tendency (and I think it applies to film and tv as well) to stick to book or stay on page. But I would never want to do anything in any format whether its acting or art or whatever to discourage people from experimenting or trying. Especially when it’s recording. It’s cheap. You’re there. You’re in the studio, the tape is rolling anyway. You might as well have a little fun with it and it loosens them up. It kind of gets the creative juices flowing. It lets them feel like they’re owning it and creating it. I found that pays off a lot with actors. When they feel like “hey, awesome, I really gave you something today”. Actors really resonate with that because they feel like they are creating and not just running down an excel spreadsheet of lines.

Abbie: And it’s amazing, on the sound effects side, how many things you can find around the office to use.

Ed: Like chicken soup and staplers and copy machines. Just spare change in a certain kind of bowl on a certain kind of desk surface sounds exactly like a loot drop.

Abbie: So are you constantly listening to all of us and the sounds we make?

Ed: It’s sort of an occupational hazard. You’re never chilling out and being a human being. You’re always in record mode. Our photocopier is disappointingly quiet. It’s super state-of-the-art so it sort of goes “fffffffft.”

Abbie: While the rest of us are saying: “What a nice quiet copy machine.”

Ed: And I’m thinking “f***”. One thing I haven’t done yet is explore our building too much. When you can get close to the roof or on the roof those massive commercial ACs are really cool. They have a lot of sheet metal you can bang on.

Abbie: So how many different sounds can make up a game? I know there’s a range, but whats the scope?

Ed: It depends. It could be very few or very many. You look at [one game] and you might see 40-50 different sound effects. And then you look at other games and they can have 30,000 or more. Because variability’s a big thing. Sounds that repeat get obnoxious really fast.

Abbie: I’ve noticed that in games. What are your audio pet peeves?

Ed: Repetition. One of the concerns with repetition is that you can burn up a lot of memory. Sound guys and texture guys will tell you this. You’re always thinking about how much memory you’re going to spend. Quantity vs. quality, right? You can dumb down the resolution and get more in or you can get less of something that sounds really great. We’re always thinking about that. Resolution and quality. There are easy ways to get a lot of footsteps on a guy. Footsteps are the really bad one. “Clip clop clip clop.”

Abbie: I’m thinking with coconuts. Monty Python style.

Ed: Right. You put one left foot in and one right foot in and it starts to get kind of ridiculous. You can spend a relatively short amount of time and low amount of resources getting that to sound better if you just do some things intelligently. It always feels kind of lazy when I hear games do that. Also, people use a lot of stock sound effects. They pull stuff off CDs and that comes off as lazy as well. I mean, I use CDs too, everybody has to because there’s just too much work to do but you can do things to make them sound interesting and unique. And it’s not a lot of time. Laziness is my pet peeve.

Abbie: And you probably notice all those things way more than the rest of us.

Ed: Yeah, the way a visual artist goes “Oh, look how badly those texture seams line up” or an animator sees the transition from running to walking is really off. We all, as craftsmen, have those things that we see and we care about and hopefully that we work to mitigate. So when they pop through in a finished product it’s irksome. I just spent 60 bucks on you, be worthy of that.

Well, hopefully I haven’t inadvertently caused any future harm for Ed and I can’t wait to document some of our sound-gathering excursions later on. Sorry Ed!