Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Game Audio Aspirations

I recently wrote these suggestions out for an aspiring game audio professional. I thought it might ring true for others and so I'm reprinting it here with permission.

"First of all, thanks for sharing your story. We've all got one, keep cultivating yours and try out different plot lines. Keep trying to envision the next chapter. I think it's so cool that you've been in pursuit of a dream for so long and through trials and tribulations continue to find yourself coming back to the path laid before you, ready to move forward. Sometimes knowing what you want is the hardest part and from there it just takes doing. One of my recent epiphanies...and it's not like I made this that sometimes in order to know, you have to do. So my first suggestion is that you do and keep doing what it is your heart tells you to do. Being honest with yourself about what your heart needs lays fertile ground for the cultivation of dreams. This is at the root of it: dreams can come true. It takes work, time, focus, and magic. There are too many stories of dreams coming true for it to be a hoax, and I've got more than a few myself.

Next up, what should you do? It's easy: do what you love. If you focus on that then you can't go wrong. Don't know exactly what it is that you love to do? Do everything instead, until you figure out the things you are naturally drawn to vs. the things that suck your soul dry. We all know these things inherently, but are willing to overlook some of them depending on the paycheck/ circumstance/ reward.

Fuck.That.Shit (thanks to @joecavers for tweeting that every couple of months)

Follow your bliss towards the thing that makes you feel good. Even if the results of that are terrible, don't worry you can't help but get better at the things you love to do. Because you'll keep doing them, not because of x y z, but because it feels good. When you feel good it bleeds into everything you produce. Need some validation that everyone is terrible when they first start out? Go look up my demo reel from 7 years ago...or an example of anyone's work from their early years. Internalize this acknowledgement and press through the emotions. Keep walking the path.

Maybe you should take a break and ready this timeless tome from Dr. Suess...or this beautiful cartoon of Alan Watts' famous lecture.

Ok, ready? Now for some nitty gritty.

1. Find people to work with. You will learn more from others than you ever will from a book or class...err, I guess classes have people so that's not totally true. Look for opportunities and projects that are willing to give you a shot at lending a hand, then prove to be a handy addition to the team in whatever way possible. Maybe it's by being the person who calls a meeting when shit's fucked up or maybe you wrangle a spreadsheet to help keep assets straight for the animators...whatever it is, do good! Some of the first projects I worked on are still alive in the world. Games I never expected to see the light of day, risen from the ashes of troubled development and shipped. It's heartwarming to think about people I worked with who are now in great positions in the game industry, people who were on the same level as me when I first started out. People who had passion, people who cared for the right reasons, people who loved what they were doing, for the sake of it.

2. Find a community online: twitter #GameAudio, gameaudioforum, G.A.N.G., IASIG...whichever one seems good to you. Better yet, find an IGDA meeting, other gamedev meetup, or audio-centric meeting where you can socialize with people who share a passion for games and audio. Find a way to help with their initiatives, find a way to share the experience of learning so that others might learn from you. Become an expert in the thing you love, share that with people. Dig into resources like GameAudioPodcast, GameAudioRelevance, GameAudio101, GameSoundDesign, DesigningSound, CreatingSound, and while you're consuming all of these tasty morsels of game audio, please keep doing. Find a way to build a feedback loop of doing and sharing what you're doing, whether it's through the community or friends or the internet at large. You will build a body of work just by doing, which will stand as a testament to how far you'll have come when you look back from the future. Dig through some of my old stuff, there's some heinous business out there written in my's who I was and what I knew then. Always try your best to represent yourself clearly and honestly (if you don't know say so) but everyone is entitled to an opinion.

3. Sharpen you tools, whatever they are. Before you can do that, know what it is you're trying to build. This goes right back to the question of what your heart wants. Once you've figured that out (no easy feat!) work on making your process and pipeline a work of art. Nobody could have told me I would be rocking some serious spreadsheets in order to do this technical sound design gig, but I have rocked my fair share on every project I've ever been on. Maybe that's how my brain works. I'm no wizard but I can pull off some cool tricks that help me pass through the unenviable task of data management unscathed by concatenated strings. The same goes for some Wwise/ FMOD/ Unreal/ etc. bidness. Ask me to design sounds in Pro Tools and I'm the slowest cowboy in the mid-west, probably not even that good at it at the end of the day. However, I can get surgical on a .wav file and throw something together for fun. Sound for cinematics ten hours a day does not complete me. The beautiful thing is, it's likely that cinematic sound is someone else's passion. Someone who loves that as much as I love getting sounds to play back and sound good inside a game engine."

Above all else, keep dreaming...that is the key.

Sound Quote: Siddhartha - Herman Hesse

Escape is a warm pleasure. Submerged in another experience I can bring back insights to apply back in the real world. Regardless of the medium, I continue to be drawn to the way sound is represented. Whether it's movie-going, game sound studies, or just plain ambiance-soaking; when I am able, I try to practice an appreciate for the sound, and the organization and representation of sound, from artists in each of these fields.

Which brings me to the the Sound Quote series here on the Lost Chocolate Blog. I have a habit of reading books with a keen ear towards how writers choose to describe sounds. It's easy to find plot synopsis and story information for books, but assessing how people write about the ephemeral quality of air-vibrations in print continues to fascinate. Here are a few from Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, which center around the main characters relationship with a stream during the latter part of his life.

"The river flowed softly and quietly, it was the dry season, but its voice sounded strange: it laughed! It laughed clearly. The river laughed, it laughed brightly and clearly at the old ferryman. Siddhartha stopped, he bent over the water, in order to hear even better, and he saw his face reflected in the quietly moving waters, and in this reflected face there was something, which reminded him, something he had forgotten, and as he thought about it, he found it: this face resembled another face, which he used to know and love and also fear.

"You've heard it laugh," he said. "But you haven't heard everything. Let's listen, you'll hear more."

The river sang with a voice of suffering, longingly it sang, longingly, it flowed towards its goal, lamentingly its voice sang.

Siddhartha listened. He was now nothing but a listener, completely concentrated on listening, completely empty, he felt, that he had now finished learning to listen. Often before, he had heard all this, these many voices in the river, today it sounded new. Already, he could no longer tell the many voices apart, not the happy ones from the weeping ones, not the ones of children from those of men, they all belonged together, the lamentation of yearning and the laughter of the knowledgeable one, the scream of rage and the moaning of the dying ones, everything was one, everything was intertwined and connected, entangled a thousand times. And everything together, all voices, all goals, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all that was good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of it together was the flow of events, was the music of life. And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to this river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om: the perfection."

Herman Hesse is one of the authors I continue to come back to. Whether it's because of his book 'Damien' which comes close in spelling to my name, or because of  the struggling artist theme that seems to run throughout books like Gertrude and Steppenwolf, his writing continues to reveal insight throughout my life.