Creating the Audio for an Interactive Virtual Reality Nature Documentary Experience
With over 10 years as a full-time music composer working in the video game industry and over 500 credits, I’ve had the immense opportunity to collaborate on my first Virtual Reality project, working with Breaking Walls, a Montreal-based game development studio, on their latest project titled “AWAY | VR | The Survival Series.”
Our team has spent the past several months plugging away, providing both a custom orchestral soundtrack, sound design and audio integration, as well as overall audio direction to enhance this 360-degree interactive and cinematic virtual reality experience. As audio lead and composer on this project, I will share some of the details and insights regarding the development of the full audio package, from music, sfx, audio integration and voice over.
FIRST FLIGHT
Built for the HTC Vive, AWAY features a unique game-play aesthetic where the player, taking the form of a Bearded Vulture, begins perched in it’s nest on a desolate cliff, surrounded by towering peaks, swarming birds and a view of the grand vistas below. We soon find ourselves launching into flight, exploring the absolute grandness of an untouched natural environment. Playing for the first time, I found myself almost collapsing as I launched into mid air, the ground falling away below me — literally weak in the knees as if I’d actually jumped off a cliff. The sense of realism from flying as a bird in an interactive virtual reality world is astounding. As the game unfolds, the player progresses through a burning forest in a fight for it’s life as it struggles to once again reach safety.
MUSIC — THE FLIGHT OF THE BEARDED VULTURE
It’s always been a personal/professional dream to be asked to provide an original musical backdrop for a visual flying sequence. Upon initial investigation into creative approaches for this wondrous experience, some favorite cinematic flying themes would come to mind as possible reference: “Buckbeak’s Flight” (Harry Potter: The Prisoner of Azkaban) and the “ET Flying Theme” by John Williams, both daunting choices to aspire to. However, from initial conversations with the development team, in-game walk-through videos that were provided and our first live demos with the current build at the time, it became evident that this experience carries a sense of realism and hope, rather than a heavy story-telling or fantasy treatment. I thought the music that would best serve this experience would feature an open, cinematic quality that would allow the player to feel immersed without being distracted. Therefore, more contemporary soundtrack references including documentary television programming such as BBC’s Planet Earth and Discovery Channel’s LIFE felt most appropriate. I had worked on both these projects as part of the music production team, helping to provide original music as well as support with the symphonic orchestration, and those experiences helped inform my approach to this project.
With a bit more research, hours of critical listening, and a bit of guidance through the study of classical scores with lush orchestral string writing, the musical palette was set: slowly-unfolding, beautiful string harmonies, some light flute and additional string locomotion, sparse but epic drums, and a subtle mallet treatment to add a touch of magic that would be felt in the mix.
For other parts of the in-game experience, the tone changes as the music slowly builds in intensity with suspenseful strings, epic drums, guitar effects and custom performances played on both classical and electric violin by one of our frequent collaborators.
CREATING AN ADAPTIVE MUSICAL EXPERIENCE USING Wwise
Taking this interactive journey through cliffs, valleys and forest, there is no set timetable for how long it will take for the player to complete the experience. However, while we can veer right or left, lightly exploring the backdrop and scenery, the path is linear as opposed to that of an open world sandbox. With this in mind, the music unfolds, based around a set of horizontal music sections that can be stretched out, looped or compressed based on how quickly or slowly the player progresses though the game. In some cases the music can loop in 30-second sections, in others, transition stingers were created to seamlessly bridge one section to another.
Finally, in a few appropriate sections, the score also features a touch of vertical adaptive layering, where musical elements can be simultaneously stacked to create an additional sense of building tension.
DEATH SCENARIOS AND MUSICAL STINGERS
Throughout game-play, there are various scenarios where the player can die, either through collision with objects in the environment or through veering too far off course. Since the music is always changing in harmonic progression and intensity throughout, it proved important to create a unique death stinger that would match each section of the soundtrack. Therefore, if the player dies at any given moment, the musical experience of dying will be perceived seamlessly as part of the interactivity of the soundtrack. For this particular episode, on average, a unique stinger was created for each 30-second section of music.
CREATING A HYPER-REALISTIC EXPERIENCE — OVERALL AUDIO AESTHETICS AND GOALS
The shared vision of the team from the outset of production was to create an emotional and believable journey for the player to experience the world from an animal’s perspective. This realism is created in part through the aural experience. Therefore, everything must sound believable. The desired result here is not entirely different from what might be experienced in a feature film. However, through convincing and proximity-based sfx, an adaptive and emotional soundtrack, and a top notch documentary-infused voice over performance, the goal was to implement a multi-dimensional layered audio experience that follows the players’ location and progress in real-time through the experience.
In a 360-degree virtual world, achieving such realism requires a sense of interaction with the environment. One way this was accomplished was to be able to adjust the sound effects during fly-by situations. For example, when passing trees or rock outcroppings, the sounds could be perceived as further away or closer depending on the proximity of the bird to the object they are flying near. This required custom programming so that the audio system could track these objects in relation to where the player was flying at any given moment in the game.
Additionally, sfx could also be multi-layered, so within a single effect, there may be multiple sound sources that are working together to create a more convincing, multi-dimensional event. This might include a mono component providing the foundation of the sound, as well as an additional sound component, which could be triggered in different locations in the stereo field depending on proximity to the player and the object they are passing or interacting with.
Finally, for the soundtrack, it was agreed that in order to create the greatest amount of emotional impact for the player, the game would benefit from a live symphonic orchestral treatment. With the goal of simulating the feeling of soaring over an untouched natural habitat, the music, recorded in a room full of professional classical string players, would dynamically swell and contract with the lush and hopeful unfolding harmonic progression. I was thrilled to work with a 40-piece orchestra in Budapest and the level of emotion and dynamics that they brought with their performance elevated the music to a new plateau that would have been otherwise unattainable when using only computer-based sounds and samples. With an augmented soundscape, this put the icing on the cake to create a wide, emotional, and cinematic musical experience.
CONCLUSION
I hope you have enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at creating an immersive audio experience for the nature-based VR episodic adventure game: “AWAY | VR | The Survival Series.” Be sure to follow the game on Steam:
Mike Raznick is a prolific, multi-award winning composer and audio director. His music has been heard on over 500 mobile, indie, social, casual, VR and AAA games as well as numerous films, television productions and promotional trailers including Ratchet and Clank, Clash of Clans, Harry Potter, Bionicle, Firefall and more. Mike’s client list includes Sony, Microsoft, Warner Bros., LEGO, CBS, MTV, HBO, Last Day of Work, Red5 Studios, A&E, Mercedes, NASA, Insomniac Games, Disney, EA, Zynga, Atari, Sega, Ubisoft and more.
www.mikeraznick.com | www.dreamcraftaudio.com | Mike Raznick
