(upbeat music)
- So in Uncharted's case, we
have something that's billed
as a Saturday morning pulp
adventure comic basically
or an old timey Indiana
Jones type adventure.
And so there are limits to what we can do
in terms of being super
weird with the production.
But we did do some things
that were different
on this project.
We used a smaller string
ensemble than we had
in previous Uncharted's,
and that was an idea
Henry and I came up with, talking about,
what could we do to give
this project a little edge?
And now for interactive
and editing purposes,
we do what's called
striping when we record.
So we have the whole
orchestra in the room.
Once they've worked through the cue
a time or two and we've
made our notes and stuff,
then we stripe it, and that means
we take individual elements and
have them play one at a time
while the other players sit there.
Sounds inefficient, but
we actually go super fast
doing that, because we get to hear the cue
in all its glory, but
then we also get this
really fine control in
the mix and an editorial.
So we might break things out,
like the short string passages
and the long string passages,
low and high strings,
the brass, we might separate the melodies
so that if we're creating
a loop of a piece,
we don't have to play the melody
every time you hear the
loop, things like that.
This also allows us to do things
like we did on this project,
which is we had a 26 piece string section
and, I think, 15 or 18 brass players.
Now, if we recorded them all together,
you'd never hear the strings.
That's a lot of brass.
But because we were able to stripe it,
we had this really cool,
intimate string sound
that was really edgy, and
especially on the action stuff,
they're a lot tighter,
there's not so many of them,
so you don't get that kind of swimmy vibe.
So that was a big thing for us.
Just real quickly, just as an aside,
this is the Call of Duty:
Infinite Warfare project,
scored by a phenomenal
up-and-coming composer
named Sarah Schackner, and
she did a synth hybrid thing,
so her modular synths and things like that
were part of her orchestra basically.
She also plays all the
stringed instruments
in the orchestra wonderfully,
so she turned in a lot of mock-ups
that were meant to be
recorded by an orchestra
with live parts already in there,
and so we were augmenting that
instead of replacing it, and
her music was so bass-heavy
that I pitched this idea
of basically putting
the high-strings in the back of the room,
which they were super psyched about.
So we put all the violins in
the very back of the room,
but it was cool because
even when we were striping
and they were playing on their own,
they were a lot further
from the microphone tree
at the conductor position,
and it just gave us a different sound.
They sounded distant,
they sounded far away,
they had more of a textural effect base,
and then we got great low end
and stuff out of the celly,
which were right there
in front of the tree.
And it just, to the extent
that it kinda just messed
with the players a little bit,
I thought that was cool too.
We just got different performances,
they reacted differently.
We also had the principal
in every part of the string
section with a pick up
on their instrument,
which was another thing
we had to talk them into.
We re-amped a lot of the
strings back at home,
so that's our studio in the Bay area,
and we were running the violins
through this Leslie cabinet on the right.
So just, you know, interesting ways
to make your score iconic.
Back to Uncharted, we
relied really heavily
on soloists, especially
ethnic instruments,
which has always been a
big thing of Uncharted.
Henry works with a brilliant percussionist
named Satnam Ramgotra, and
Satnam played all over this thing
and as you're gonna see in a minute,
the percussion was a huge element
in our implementation,
and we needed a lot more
percussion than the
actual minutes of music
we had in the game.
So he had to layer extra
percussion on every cue.
So we worked with him a lot.
We did, I don't know,
eight or ten days with him.
And then the guy in the funny hat
is Henry's, one of his
co-composers, Alex Belcher.
He's a brilliant session guitarist,
and Henry brought in guitar as an element
to this score too, which was really cool.
And then we had ethnic woodwinds,
like we do in all the Uncharted games,
sprinkled on top.
This is just a summary of what we did.
We recorded at Air Studios in London.
We did a couple different sessions.
We partnered with legendary
mixing engineer, Allan Meyerson,
on the mixing, so he came
in and worked with us,
so that we could keep our
world, as he calls it,
within the confines of
our system in our office.
So we have this whole pipeline
where mixing is kind of
part of the implementation pipeline,
and Allan really dug that and
came in and worked with us,
so he worked about four or five days
co-mixing this with us,
built us a template,
and then handed it off to us,
and then he reviewed all our
mixes throughout the process,
and that was fantastic.
I guess we only had 12
brass and 21 strings,
so my numbers are off.
So that's the production.
I want to dive in now,
for the rest of the talk
I'm gonna talk about implementation
because that's the real interesting story,
I think, on this project,
was going back to that slide
where I said, what are we
gonna do different, what's new?
We wanted a more responsive
and interactive Uncharted
than we'd ever had before.
