In Star Wars Battlefront, Audio Director Ben Minto provides extensive insights into his work. He ensures that everything sounds as it does later on. But where do you get a blaster sound from? By hitting a rope with a wedding ring.
As gamers, we only see the result of games, the sum of all parts. How this is done exactly is a mystery. What a graphic designer does can still be roughly imagined: he probably draws a lot. What a writer contributes to a video game can also be somewhat summarized; he writes texts and devises stories. With programmers, however, most people it’s where it stops.
But what does an “audio designer” do in a video game? Ben Minto, Audio Director of Star Wars Battlefront, gives us a really exciting insight into a thrilling job.
He walks through the forests of Endor with a directional microphone, which astonishingly are located on the Pacific Coast near Skywalker Ranch, capturing the wind in the giant trees on the Pacific Coast. The original recording of Endor was also made here.
But he is not only outdoors searching for sounds; a good part of his job consists of mixing existing sounds. Many noises in the finished game reveal little about their origin. Grunts from Icelandic seals are used for the lava flow atmosphere on Sullust. From a leaky beer pump and the ultrasound recordings of his unborn son, Minto mixes a machine sound.
He travels to the largest structure in Western Europe, a 412-meter tall longwave radio mast, to capture a sound that resembles a blaster. For essentially, the radio mast is a huge tension cable. And for the sound of the original blasters, the sound engineers used to hit a tension cable with a rock or a wedding ring. Minto also tried this; he found the better sound when he heard the cable singing in the wind.
It’s a puzzle work on the computer that Minto engages in to find the perfect sound, and whenever one is missing, it seems he grabs his microphone, travels to extraordinary places, and even thinks about the job in his free time. While the team celebrated the completion of Battlefield 3 in Dubai, Minto was in the desert: he was recording wind sounds.
You can find the entire blog post with numerous audio examples on the Star Wars Battlefront page.
