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Interview with Joey Kuras
What projects are you currently at work on? I’ve got quite a list at the moment, hope I can remember them all. Tomorrow Never Dies, Pac-Man World, Tony Hawk's Skateboarding, Bass Master Classic, Spiderman, Wheel of Time, Knockout Kings 2000, Stunt Copter, Messiah, Demolition Racer, Test Drive 6, March Madness 2000, Sacrifice, Time Crisis, and the cinematics for Army Men: Air Attack. We did 30 projects last year, it was crazy. This is definitely our best year. We’ve got some quality titles to work on and I’m proud of them. I can’t wait for them to come out so I can play them.
Do you have any specific routine you stick to that keeps you actively creative? A typical day for me is pretty much set in stone. I wake up everyday at 8 AM and head out to train at the US Taekwondo Center (http://www.ustc-kickboxing.com/); I also teach Taekwondo & Kickboxing there. Then I train with weights for an hour 3 times a week. After that, my workday gets rolling. I usually work until midnight, which is my cutoff point unless there is something that needs to be finished. I try and take a lot of breaks so that I can stay creative. It’s nice that I am able to do that. As long as I meet my deadlines, it doesn’t really matter how many breaks I take. Plus, when I do get focused, I sometimes surprise myself with how quickly I get things done. Any special sound design philosophy you follow? Do you normally try for sounds that are ‘out there’ or believable Foley sounds? It’s just a matter of looking at what you need and deciding whether it should be realistic or over the top. Usually over the top is better. When you go to the movies, everything is over the top. You want a big sound, loud and in your face. You want to grab people’s attention, and we want to try and achieve the same thing in video games. My style is very literal. You don’t want to use a cap gun sound for a .44 magnum, but you don’t want to use a .44 magnum sound either because is sounds like a cap gun. So, you need to make everything bigger. So my style is literal, but in a Hollywood sense. If you see something, some action, you will hear what you expect to hear. Now it may be much bigger sounding than you expect but that’s my creative license, I suppose. Some projects require things to sound very real. We were recently working on Beavis and Butthead -- Do U, which needed a lot of sounds that weren’t in any effects libraries, like the big folding bleachers in a school gym. How am I going to make something like that with what I have lying around the house? It’s just too difficult to try to create from scratch, so I went to a school and had the maintenance guy open them up while I recorded them. For Tony Hawk's Skateboarding, we needed the skateboard rolling and scraping every possible surface you can think of, concrete, asphalt, sidewalk, gravel, dirt, brick, water, walls, rails, metal roof. We just grabbed a skateboard and went all over town rolling and scraping it on everything we could find that sounded cool. The bodyfalls were fun to do. Well, not really. Tommy and I took turns slamming ourselves onto the ground. It got to be pretty painful after a while. So when you play the game and hear the painful grunt as he hits the ground, that’s real.
Test Drive 5 and 6, we went out and got all those sounds ourselves. We went down to the Marconi Auto Museum, as they have everything there: Porsches, Ferraris, old muscle cars, even a track ready ’65 Mustang GT350 with a 302 engine and no mufflers. I was standing right next to the thing and the guy said I might want to stand back a little. Well, it was so loud I was standing a good 30 feet away when I recorded it. It was incredible. We also recorded Tommy’s cars, since he has a Lamborghini, a ’68 & ’69 Mustang, and a classic Porsche. No sense letting them go to waste. For spaceship sounds, I obviously can’t just go out and get those since I can’t seem to find any, so that takes a little bit of creativity. The fishing game we are working on needs sounds of fishing reels and the plunk of bait hitting the water. The best way to get those sounds is to just record them live in Tommy’s pool. For boxing games like Knockout Kings 2000, you’ll find that a real punch doesn’t sound like anything except maybe a little slap. Obviously we have to go Hollywood on that, and make them sound big. Celery works great for this purpose, especially for the sound of a jaw breaking. Go through alot of celery, do you? I did that day, for sure. The whole house smelled like celery and that’s what I ended up having for lunch. No sense letting it go to waste. For most of the cinematics, I use Foley. Like Pac-Man World, which we were looking at earlier, I needed the sound of papers falling from the sky, and I could have spent all day looking for that on the library. I said forget it. I grabbed some paper, threw it in the air, recorded it ,and I was done, 2 seconds worth of work instead of 2 hours looking through a library. We have almost every sound library there is, so to go through thousands and thousands of sounds would take forever. There are alot of sounds that people don’t have, simple things. In almost every game we’ve done with weapons, we’ve needed a grenade bouncing sound. There aren’t any in a library, so I went online to a military surplus store and ordered a bunch of dummy grenades and recorded them myself. Sometimes you just have to do it yourself. |
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