Sounds Sessions with Matt Applegate
Before I had started the course I had heard about Matt Applegate however I didn’t really know much about him, I was very excited to hear that he would be teaching us in sound workshops, firstly we started looking at Star Wars the Clone Wars cartoon, at first I thought it was a bit strange but as we got into it more and it was explained I could see the relevance to sounds in games and what we could learn about them from watching this cartoon, since all the sounds in a cartoon are man-made so to speak, if you don’t put in a sound to a cartoon there is no sound, whereas if you were to film something in real life you would have natural sounds like footsteps, background noise and breathing. All these sounds are natural however in a cartoon and even in games there are no natural sounds, they all have to be recorded, edited and placed into the appropriate place.
The next thing we looked at was game trailers, we took a lot of time watching the gears of war trailer, the music in the trailer is Mad World which is smooth and calm track, when you put this with the guns and violence of gears of war it was strange how it worked, the music was there to make you feel calm and at ease whereas the video itself was aimed to put you on edge, this made the trailer really grab my attention as I wasn’t sure how to perceive it.
A few weeks into our lessons we started learning about Foley Artists, these are people that make the sounds that go into games/cartoons and movies, they produce sound using strange objects such as pieces of glass and vegetables and then edit these so they can be used in whichever way they are needed. We had a go at making our own sounds using a Foley Artist kind of method with varying degrees of success, our zombie sounds involved us moving around a room, groaning and then trying not to laugh at each other. We made a laser gun sound similar to one found in star wars, this was done with a metal slinky and a plastic cup, I personally was shocked by this as it sounded perfect without any computer editing and I’m still currently on the hunt to find my old metal slinky so I can sit there for hours of end producing sounds to worry my parents and confuse my neighbours.
I have really enjoyed the sound lessons we had with Matt Applegate and I believe what I have learned will be very valuable for the future, I have also learned that a Stargate opening is just a toilet flushing through a low pass filter, I can no longer watch Stargate properly, Thanks Matt
