Major Project - The Last of Us

'The Last of Us' is a survival game set in a post-apocalyptic world which follows Joel, who is a smuggler, tasked with escorting a young teenage girl named Ellie across a virus ravaged United States of America. The creatures or ex-humans have been infected by the Cordyceps Virus; turning them into flesh eating monsters. The game has won multiple international gaming awards and is regarded as one of the best games of all time. One of the main components of the game that have garnered critical acclaim is the sound design. It is incredibly realistic, terrifying and immersive.

For the purposes of our major project, myself, Dylan Crause, Fraser Williams and Peter Jackson have taken "The Last of Us' debut trailer and re-created the entire sound bed. Foley, ADR, Atmos, Scoring etc have all been redesigned from scratch. This reflection will go into detail about the process behind our version of the trailer!

Foley/ADR/Atmos-

• Footsteps- instead of going offsite to find sample, we used the walls of the Audient 8024 live room to emulate footsteps on wood. Result was good!

• A lot of wrestling to get male grunts/emulate rustling of clothes and fighting scenes

• Bursting through doors towards the end of the trailer- The group went to level 3 at the SAE library door and using F8 and Sennheiser shotgun mic, recorded doors being closed on the metal points and banging into the door. These sounds were then layered and we now have an effective and realistic sound of the door bursting open.

• Reece was male ADR for character Joel- Reece had a good deep voice, it helped match the intensity of the larger man that Joel is. Some of his deliveries were a little ‘rehearsed’ and unnatural, but ultimately works well enough

• Sarah Female ADR for ’Ellie’- had a great nostalgic tone to her voice, fits the age of Ellie well. Also added in new ‘I don’t know how much longer we can last’ to end the dialogue- improved on the original

(snippet of one section of our Foley library for recycled assets)

• Blood drips- recycled from old Foley library

• Also recycled some paper tears in my Foley library to help layer for the stab hits when Ellie is fighting the monster

• Atmos was recorded with F8 on an old project- trees blowing, bat and bird sounds

• Dropped wood in the C24 to emulate fight scenes

• David and Peter ADR recorded monster sounds- snarls, growls and screams were layered, pitch shifted, filtered, time shifted and reverbed to create new monster effects

Scoring-

• Fraser recorded playing guitar with pair of Neumann U87’s. Fantastic sound that really matches the macabre feeling of running away down the hallway. Was recorded in the C24 trying to chase some added room reverberation. The piece is an original one and Fraser did a standout job playing! We had originally planned to record the guitar in the S6, but the C24 proved to be a great room for this particular recording.

Feedback from Guy-

The group had some amazing feedback from lecturer Guy Grey in week 10. He was really pleased with the projects progress. Here is a brief overview of the changes/additions he helped us make during the session-

* Blood drips were fixed up. They were too 'water tap' like. Took out some of the high frequencies around 5-7 kHz and low end up to 1 kHz. Also added low and hi pass filters to remove added noise

* Male ADR was a little muddy- used EQ- bit of a cut at 200-300Hz-muddiness, balancing to match the female voice. Gave it a bump around 2kHz to make his voice a little less monotone

* Looked at the leveling for the female ADR to the guitar- used some automation to make her voice sit above the guitar a little more

* Low pass filter added onto the guitar, also removed everything above 8kHz to take the brightness of the strings down a bit

* Originally removed everything below 100 Hz on female voice....put a little bump in around 200-300 Hz.... bit more air in her voice now

* Clip gaining female VOX to a better, average level

Using RX- De Click in the picture above, we set the sensitivity to a reasonably high number to try and target the clicks heard in Sarah's vocal. Setting this sensitivity bar too high can actually distort the original signal so we set it to an amount that was useful for us. The frequency skew was also set above zero to help identify which frequency range the clicks resided (mid range for this vocal).

Using RX-click to remove lip smacks etc. We placed RX De-click on the Sarah's vocal track to try and eliminate some click that could be heard in her voice. As seen in the picture above, we located the troublesome transients and proceeded to pencil them out throughout the entire vocal track. Removing these clicks and repairing the audio created a far more free flowing and uninterrupted delivery of the vocal. There were quite a few noticeable ones and also a few that only the trained ear of Guy noticed so it was fantastic getting him in on a studio session to help us locate them!

Mixing/Mastering-

• Mixed trailer in 5.1

Mixing in 5.1 is basically a total of six output busses that send signal to five speakers and a sub-woofer as shown in the picture above. The speakers are set up in such a way that (yup, you guessed it) they SURROUND the viewer and totally immerse them in their viewing experience; pending on the quality of the speakers of course!!

• Limiter used on Master- subtle raising of the ceiling around -0.3dB for added loudness

• Low Frequency Effect- gunshots now come through the sub, impact sounds of the wood- all around 80Hz are now much meatier- the audience really feels the rumble of these low frequency sounds- adds to the suspenseful aesthetic of the scenes

• Made sure that the LUFs leveling was going to be as close to -13 as possible for YouTube loudness standards compliance

Above a snippets of some of the automation utilized in this project. Illustrated in the top picture are the monster sounds that occur about halfway into the trailer. 4 monsters rush across the screen in about 2 seconds flat. We panned the monsters so that they appeared to come from the center speaker and quickly follow the visuals running off to the right of the screen. As the shrieks/snarls of the monsters 'move' across the room, it kind of feels like you are watching them live which is a very immersive aesthetic addition.

Things that could have been improved!!

I think the overall project was a success. The consistency of project work however needed much more.... consistency. There were a few weeks where the project hit a stall point and no work was carried out on it. For instance, week 8 was our original ADR deadline but was not completed until the end of week 9 as we only found a female actor towards the end of the Tri. There was definitely mounting pressure and we had a mini stall point as working around the non-present female vocal (which is the most predominant vocal on the clip) became increasingly hard. The updated project schedule can be seen below-

I also believe the consistency of Reece's male ADR deliveries could have been better. He had only seen the trailer a couple of times before recording. It was up to the group to make sure he was properly rehearsed and understood the importance of emphasis and timing on his vocals. They worked pretty well in the end but if our project is to stand out amongst the industry standard, more consideration and better preparation could have helped improve his sound.

It is out of scope and probably unnecessary, but mixing the trailer in 10.1 with the use of roof monitors could have been very beneficial for one particular scene- when dust falls from the ceiling as Ellie runs up the stairs. Just thought I would mention it as a cool aesthetic improvement!

Industry Feedback-

I reached out to Naughty Dog Gaming to notify them of our intentions to use the clip on YouTube and that we had no intentions of profiting from it so as not to coincide with copyright issues. I also asked for a potential feedback response if anyone had some spare time to look at the clip! So far no response haha. But you never know unless you ask!

Comparison to Industry Standards-

Below is our final product uploaded to social media platform, YouTube.

I believe that there are certain elements from our project that rival that of the original. Firstly, the use of atmospheric rumble to immerse the listener. In the still shot of the clip you see above, this is heard most prominently and really adds to the scene as Joel is waiting for the creature to attack in the room.

Mixing the clip in 5.1 for the purposes of academic presentation and new experiences allowed us to get pretty tricky with sending different audio to different sides of the room i.e our monsters running from centre of screen to off of the screen. Again this adds to the immersion of the audience and making them feel like the monsters are actually there.

Follow this link to view the original!

I think the original clip is tighter overall and mixed more consistently than that of our product level wise. Whilst our project was a success, I feel that our male ADR could have been more properly rehearsed. There is a noticeable discrepancy between the quality of the male and female ADR. Our background atmos needed lowering in certain areas to match the scene better (made apparent by presenting in 5.1 in the theaterette). Improvement on the cocking of the revolver hammer when Joel is about to fight the creature. The original has a reverb on that scene and it makes you feel like you are in the bathroom with him. Can't believe we missed that one.

One thing really worth mentioning is that both our product and the original have differing but macabre musical scoring that really fit the narrative. I quite like Fraser's interpretation of the scene.

Apart from the elements mentioned above, I feel that the group can be pretty proud of what we have achieved. Presenting to the class showed us where we could improve and was a good learning experience. I quite enjoy the process of post-production and look forward to working on more and building a bigger portfolio of sound replacements to hone my skills after completing this degree. Our group worked pretty well together for the most part but a bit more effort from all involved would have tightened the screws even more.

References-

Production Expert. (2018). Tutorial - The DOs And DON'Ts Of Mixing In Surround. [online] Available at: https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2017/12/20/tutorial-the-dos-and-donts-of-mixing-in-surround