No Prisoners, No Mercy show 54 allowed us the privilege of having a round table discussion…a meeting of the minds between the game development community and the blogging community. In the course of discussion immersion in video games, one of the major subjects for the show, we discussed sound. Our friend R.W. Harper told us how he started out making sound for his games using Sound Forge and now they have recording studios for each project. Sound, he confirmed, is one of the major ways to achieve immersion.
Many players of my acquaintance turn the sound off altogether and turn on their mp3 player. On one occasion that practice elicited a response from a guildie that was wont to repeat this practice, “You mean this game has sound?” For me, however, if the sound can’t be heard a major part of the virtual reality is gone. It is much the same principle as a professionally prepared meal – as any good chef will tell you a major part of the meal is how it is presented.
No matter what you may personally think of Turbine Studios, or their Lord of the Rings game, whoever is doing sound for that game does a fantastic job. Even small touches can have a large impact on your perceptions of virtual reality, even when you don’t intentionally notice it. Try this some time…ride your horse (or pony if you are a hobbit) down a dirt path in the Shire where the road comes to a wooden bridge. Notice how the sound of your horse’s hooves changes when they reach the bridge and go back to their muffled state when they reach the dirt path again.
When sound becomes even more important…
As many of you have noticed, I am sure, medium wherein we enjoy our media are beginning to merge. There was a time when a comic book was something you had to decide if you wanted to read while you head your popsicle – now they are the subject of major motion pictures. And even the way those major motion pictures are produced has changed drastically in the last decade, finally reaching its zenith in movies like “Avatar.” For those one or two of you out there that have not seen this amazing film, here is a excerpt from an article that tells how it was produced:
“Recording takes place on a spare motion-capture stage called the volume. Actors wear skin-tight bodysuits with reflective makers; every movement is tracked by an array of more than 100 fixed cameras. A specialized head-rig camera records the actor’s face and eyes.
‘The virtual camera is always active,’ explained Avatar producer Jon Landau. Gone is the need for camera and lighting setups, makeup retouches and need to be shot repeatedly from different camera angles. Instead the camera data are fed into a computer that creates a 3-D replica of the actor’s every movement, and the directors can just add his camera moves – from any perspective – digitally.’” – The animated acting of avatar by Rachel Abramowitz, Tribune Newspapers
Apparently there are some members of the movie industry that do not consider the actor behind the image capture as acting. Many people whose job it is to know better still do not consider that actor who gives life through voice and motion to the animated version of themselves as an actor at all. Here is what the talented actor who played Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy had to say about it:
“’If you don’t have the performance, the rest is dressing,’ Serkis said. ‘You can’t enhance a bad performance with animation. You can’t dial it up, lift the lip or the eyebrow. It has to be right at the core moment. For actors to not recognize performance capture as acting is bad and disrespectful. It’s also Luddite.’” – Andy Serkis (who played Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movie Trilogy) The animated acting of avatar by Rachel Abramowitz, Tribune Newspapers
As media merge in such an astounding fashion, where animation becomes to real that you have to study the screen to tell where the live action ends, and the computer graphics begin, Jeff Bridges gives us a view of what may be the wave of the future:
“’I’m sure they could do it not with they wanted. Actors will kind of be a thing of the past,’ Bridges [actor Jeff Bridges] told Tribune Newspapers the day nominations were announced. ‘We’ll be turned into combinations. A director will be able to say, ‘I want 60 percent Clooney; give me 10 percent Bridges; and throw some Charles Bronson there. They’ll come up with a new guy who will look like nobody who has ever lived and person or thing will be huge’ he said.” – The animated acting of avatar by Rachel Abramowitz, Tribune Newspapers
“What has this got to do with video games?” you might ask yourself. Well, in a word – everything. As the ability to produce ever more realistic virtual worlds progresses (and game developers these days often seem anxious to push the envelope of computer power needed to portray those virtual worlds) sound becomes more important than many people realize. Consider the first 20 levels of Age of Conan Online. Anyone who has ever played the game will tell you how amazed and immersed they were by those levels, and a major contributing factor was all the voice over work by talented actors.
The issue I would love to explore at some point in the future is just where the actor ends and the computer programmer’s art begins…and are the two merging in to one?
See you online,
Julie Whitefeather
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