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Interview With Jamey Scott
So, now that you have that 9 to 5 job, how does a typical workday usually go for you? It’s pretty varied. Because my job consists of doing both sound design and music, it is rarely the same. For three months straight, I could be working on just the score. When that happens, I arrive in the morning, fire up the rig, and compose all day. With sound effects, there is alot more paperwork, a lot of diagnosing the sound requirements, putting together design documents, things of that sort. That is currently changing in our production process now, as it’s becoming part of the event list, and I am still a major contributor to that. Once I get that together, we go through the specifics of how it will be programmed, how it will be worked into the engine, how the sounds will be triggered, and so on. Finally get into the actual sound design process. For every day of sound design I get to do, it’s about two days of paperwork. When we are putting the game together, alot of the things in the world aren’t actually there yet. After you build the world, you drop everything into it by instances. Alot of times the geometry will be there but the finished art and functionality won’t be there. I’ll have to call in the designer and have them explain what the thing is supposed to do. We discuss it in detail, I talk about my initial ideas, and we work it out. Sometimes tracking down the designer takes hours. On other days, I make an effort to get through as much of my task list as I can. Sometimes it goes very quickly. I can put a sound together in 15 minutes, other times an hour. Depending on the resources I have, or if my sound palette doesn’t have what I am looking for, I have to search around or go out and actually record the sound myself. That alone can take hours. Where I work in Sorrento Valley, it can be kind of interesting. There are always jets flying overhead and if I go outside to record a Foley sound, I have to time it between those rockets flying by. With Foley sounds, I generally just grab my mic and stomp on the ground, inside or outside. I’m getting to the point now, though, that I don’t do that as much because of the vast library I’ve collected. What gear do you use in the studio? My main thing is a Mac with Pro Tools and Digital Performer. I have a PC with Sound Forge and Nemesys’ GigaSampler. My hardware is a Mackie Digital 8 bus mixing board with the Mackie Surround Sound speaker system, an Emu E4XT sampler, Lexicon PCM-90 Reverb, Alesis EM5 drum machine and a bunch of guitar stuff that I never use anymore. When do you tend to be most creative? Pretty much anytime for me. I’m most creative when I just force myself to get out of the muck. Once I get going, the creativity just comes, everytime. Sometimes I just don’t feel like doing it so I have to force myself into it. I stop setting up the coffee pot, turn off the e-mail and just dig in. I’m a little lethargic in the mornings sometimes but once I get going, I’m OK. Once I get in the zone, nobody better interrupt me or call because I’ll bite their head off. When my wife calls, the first thing she’ll ask is if I’m in the zone or not. If I say yes, then she just hangs up without saying goodbye and tries again later. I’m kind of quirky like that. Describe your thought process when scoring a project. Most of the music I write is ambient music, as I’m setting up a mood. For that I just write something, I don’t even know where it comes from. If I ever get totally stumped, I’ll listen to soundtracks I like from my favorite movie composers to get in the mood. Every once in a while, I’ll hear a passage that might spark me into a whole other thing. Most of the time, I’ll just come up with something and take it. There is always some minute spark that will set me off. I try not to imitate or steal from other composers, as my personal goal is to maintain a unique writing style. Although I’m inspired by certain composers, I never try to copy them. I prefer to ask myself, "Now how would I have scored that?" One thing that motivates me when I’m writing is that I’m always looking for ways to stray from the diatonicism of a piece. If I’m writing something melodic, the first few bars will establish the tonality, then I will instantly shift. I rarely write constant diatonic music for underscore. With themes, I have stayed diatonic for sections, but I usually stray in B sections or what have you. This is just one of those aspects that establishes me as a stylistic writer rather than a chameleon composer. When I score to animation, I never score to storyboards. I’ll look at them to see what’s coming down the pike, but when I sit down to do it, the movie has to be complete. I hate scoring to the beat of the scene editing and then having it changed after I’ve already done the music. If that happens, I have to start practically from scratch, so I insist the work be finished. When I score, I don’t just lay a bed of music, I reinforce the editing and the dramatization. One of the scenes I did this morning, some guys where climbing down a rope, real mysterious. So I started with some high violins and a subtle tremolo viola, and then as they get closer to the ground, the bass starts to fill out. I bring in the bassoons and French horns crescendo as they reach the bottom, to create some dramatic pacing. As the camera pulls back, you see that they were being watched the whole time. The volume slowly intensifies then suddenly drops out. This is how I pace a scene and dictate the emotional impact with music. It’s important to know what types of musical devices evoke certain emotions like fear, mystery, gloom, things of that sort, and then be able to incorporate those devices into your compositional style. Obviously, a lot of people don’t do that. Many so-called composers simply lay down a 2-minute synth string chord and this suffices for all of the emotions therein. However, I like to take on a lot more responsibility, really dig into scenes, and make an impact. I feel that the more I write, the more dynamic I become. The stuff I’m doing now is more effective, I think than ever before. I definitely feel that I'm on a journey. How about Sound Effects? How do you normally work these? Well, there are lots of different types of sound effects. I am doing a lot of mechanical types of objects for Beneath, things in the world that you have to manipulate and puzzles you have to solve in order to progress through the game. There are a lot of machines, and with them I have to come up with unique types of engine sounds, so usually I will take stock engine sounds and sweeten them. I’ll put a very fast LFO filter that warbles the pitch, then I’ll mix in a ‘clunketty-clunk’ sound. The engines in one world of this game are very primitive and they have to sound rickety, so they can’t be polished sounding. Of course, none of those sounds exist in effects libraries. I have to go in and plot out on the frequency spectrum what I am going to focus on most. If it is an engine sound, its usually in the midrange, so using frequency cutoffs, I’ll add sounds right in that range so it fits like a puzzle within each other. To get my rumble, I’ve got straight low frequency rumbles in my palette that I usually create by pitch shifting something down very low, and pulling off all the highs. That can be really great for low frequency impact. The rumbles I make tend to be quantized loops that I will put some strange filter on. My sounds tend to be full frequency, sort of like the sounds James Cameron used for the Terminator movies, larger than life and totally unrealistic. That’s just my concept for sound effects. When you stick a key in a door, I don’t want to hear a tiny click, I want to hear CLICK-CLUNK. I want it to be huge, just a massive sound! For the most part, that’s what I go for. Sometimes an action may call for very slight, subtle sound effect and I do those too, but I get really excited when I get to make a huge robot walk or something like that.
Beneath is a game based about the turn of the century, during an H.G. Wells, Jules Verne type of era. When it comes to creatures in that game, the player might walk around a corner and find a 10-foot scorpion, or another giant, insect-type creature. For those, I invent exaggerated insect noises, maybe a high-pitch screech, but I’ll add some very low frequency sound to make it big. Sometimes, either I or other guys walking through the halls, will make mouth noises or blow their nose and then I tweak it accordingly. A lot of creatures have that comic gurgling kind of sound and most of the time it’s just my vocal sounds, layered and tweaked through the sampler. Death sounds are always fun too. I have a palette of screaming animals that I use, mixing and matching. I’ll add crushing skeleton sounds to round it all off. You can really have fun with those. Oh yeah. It is a lot of fun. I look at sound design as a miniature musical composition. They can be very complex and I love that sort of thing. As far as ambient sound effects go, I’ll take something very small, with no real discerning characteristics and use that. If it’s a deep cave, I’ll try something with a low, throbbing sound, with nothing recognizable to make it sound like the short loop that it is. Lava ambiance is very difficult to loop with all the gurgling and popping going on. You end up using longer loops so it doesn’t sound obvious. I had the programmers include a feature in the sound engine we often use. With a short two-second loop, we will access and play what we call stingers, various noises that are randomly selected to appear at different times, creating the illusion of a huge soundscape instead of a loop. We’ve been doing that since The Journeyman Project II -- Buried in Time. As far as the sound effects process, I look at sound effects, ambiances, voice-overs and music as all the same thing. In my mind they all contribute to the single soundscape. Everything that happens in a timeline, I’m responsible for. A voice is one timbre. The music is another timbre. They will all eventually come together and I’d like them to sound like they belong together. I don’t do outside effects projects. I don’t think alot of people understand my concept for sound effects, how I create unique effects and the time it usually takes. I’m not interested in pulling stuff off a CD and sending them the file. That’s not what this is about and I don’t like to do that sort of thing. Original creations are where my passions lay. If there is an opportunity for me to do very creative sound design, I’ll do it. I just want to stay away from using the library sounds that I’ve heard in every game for the past 5 years. |
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