Relatable Games and Films.

Finding films with relatable games.

Mirrors edge and District 13.

Mirrors edge is game about a girl who lives in an unnamed fictional city, this game primarily focus’ on the story of how far you will put yourself to achieve freedom. District 13 is based around social problems such as; drugs, violence and organized crime. Both film and videogame share aspects of free running.

In the film district 13 we see main two protagonists escaping situations, we see music progress and ascend in intensity to match the visuals, this also effects your emotions as you feel the intensity within the music.

Mirrors edge does the same thing, once spotted by police you have to run or fight, as you escape them the music intensifies, as you escape the music lowers in volume before fading.

Also they are very similar in the ambient and movement sound, in the film and game when you free run or watch the free runners they grunt, their footsteps changes dependent on what material they are on.

I think psychologically the music when the game and movie intensifies makes you feel more immersed, games sometimes take a lot of inspiration from films as films can really play and interact with human emotions also I think sometimes we forget we have other senses, yes we see with our eyes but then when you add our ears it can make you feel and embrace the movie or game more, thus making you feel a lot more immersed.

Music used in the film are different too, as district 13 is French, they use French, rap and hip hop in some of the scene where as the fictional world of mirrors edge used a more electronic future feel, with scores from Swedish electronic musician Magnus Birgersson.

Sources –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror's_Edge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_13

Article One - Noise Art.

Sound and Music in Videogames.

Music is an integral part of videogames, without it they wouldn’t be the same. We have been given the task of researching the theory of sound, psychology of sound and the legal issues.

Psychology of sound.

Sound plays a huge part in videogames, for me a game without sound is like a picture without colour. We have a few different senses and hearing is a vital one, in everyday life we never really hear true silence that’s why I think in videogames you can capture some emotions perfectly.

Everybody has heard the catchy Mario theme tune, you associate the music of that game with the gameplay. Later games with more intricate and integral stories music evolved in games, cinematic aspects were added into the sound design. Today music, sound tracks and sound effects immerse the player into ever growing videogames.

Simple things can change the feel of a videogame; this can be making a game happy by using major chords. This is a great way to tell a player they are on the right track (this is better if it isn’t verbally because most games are international). 

Adaptive music, this is an important way that sound is used in videogames which shows the player that something is happening or a objective is unfolding as you progress. We see this in many games, such as metal gear solid as the tempo of the music indicates the change of pace in game, this tells the player how to approach things subliminally.

Examples of this are when games like Wii sports, are more family orientated game uses a more elevated, overly happy style of music in the game, because the aim of the game is to be happy and to bond with the family and this coherently does just that.

Game Music.

Dependent on the genre of game, audio can be used very differently, for instance when you look and listen to games like Halo etc. You find they have higher, fuller orchestral pieces; the camera could pan out on a huge alien landscape and then with the added music you feel emotions run through you and you just want to explore. Then there are also time where in sci-fi games we see different adaptations from the audio side, a lot of older games opting for a synthesizer and more of a techno feel, this can be found today but just not as often as the technology we have today is more than capable of creating and adding huge orchestral and fancy music.

In comparison you could take Red Dead Redemption (Western Videogame). This game felt very cinematic, like you were watching a john Wayne cowboy film, the harmonica howling accompanied upon upbeat banjos when you were rewarded really made you feel immersed in the game.

They used a lot of the instruments that would have been available back in the time of the cowboy, such as steel guitars, banjos and acoustic guitars this made the game feel very atmospheric, when you were playing the game you seemed to feel like you were in a movie but all of the decisions were yours, For instance when you were on horseback and you were going fast the sounds around you felt distorted, this really made you feel like you were on the horse, in some ways things like this, small really sometimes unnoticeable things can make a game great.

Technology advances and with that the experience we get does, you can get full soundtracks, climactic music sequences and more in the most average of games and now after looking into audio in video games you appreciate how to have a good game it must be accompanied with great audio and soundtrack.

Now take a PG game like Mario where its very arcade, childish and simple then accompany this with a fun upbeat theme tune, simple beeps and bops when you are rewarded and you see a fast paced plat former. This also backs up the fact of how important and integral music is with games, it creates a sense of reality, immersion and depth and for me its really paints a clearer picture of how you’re supposed to feel when gaming and as time progress’ I think that audio will become a bigger part of the gaming experience.

Foley.

Foley is the recreation of everyday, simple sound effects that are added to a lot of media such as; videogames, films and TV shows. Foley sounds are used to intensify the overall experience of the videogame or movie.

Good Foley in a TV show, film or videogame will go unnoticed and integrated into the clips near perfectly.

Foley is constructed in a sound studio known as a Foley studio. A large percentage of the sound we hear in a film and videogames are not organic, they are created off set. The recording can often be exhausting and laborious.

There are 3 main categories in the Foley creation; Feet, Props and Cloth.

Feet, this is simply footsteps. Using the right shoes and surfaces can create accurate footstep they will use things from marble to wooden floor to create accurate footsteps.

Cloth, This category is more of the subtle sounds you hear on television and in videogames. This can be the minutest thing like pants rubbing together.

Other Effects, This is built up of things like doors closing and opening, doorbell and many other things. Most of these sounds can be made by using stock sounds (archived sounds).

Personally if I had to be a Foley artist as a career I would love to work on games with really realistic sounds, games like the last of us, FARCRY and uncharted they are adventure games set in places which you will never explore where there are basic elements of walking but it could be inside of a jungle, forest or a ruined temple but you the Foley artist would have to find the sounds of the monkeys sporadically scuttling up the trees, the lighting of a torch to explore a cave, they find everything from the ground up.

I think challenging yourself would be a major element in being a Foley Artists, you could be looking to create a rumble of a cave collapsing in an epic scene and you could be in the studio all day experimenting with sounds and then you give up and go home, then when you’re at home you could put the wheelie bin out and as you push it you hear the rumble the drum of it makes accompanied with the reverb and the hard wheels crisply rolling over stones and you’ve just realized how to make your sound.

Sources Of Sound.

Music and sounds can be acquired in many different ways and with the music industry growing everyday it becomes easier. You can look for archived sounds and music, which is loyalty (free of charge).

You could get an artist to make the sound for you and pay them.

Associated Legal Issues.

Sampling music is the subject of a lot of many legal disputes; within the copyright law this can include musical compositions and sound recordings.

Some legal issues can be solved out of court with payments being made to the aggrieved party.

Copyright.

This is the exclusive and assignable right, and is given to the person who created the product for a fixed numbers of years (there life). This means when the product of the owner cannot be published or brought out by anyone else without paying and or consent from the owner.

The length of the copyright can vary dependent on the country you’re in, most times it tend to be the publishers life +50 years or +100 years.

Many things can be copyrighted, examples of these things are; Books, Poems and Songs.

In the modern age copyright has moved onto websites as it is easy to copy and paste online, so therefore the copyright law protects original content published on the web.

A great example of a copyright infringement would have been in may 2013 an iPhone game called mine was ruled to infringe on Tetris’ copyright and trade dress, to summaries, XIO (the company the who infringed on the copyright) and were found to have infringed on Tetris. This was a big step in copyright in the video game market as creativity and influences can remind you of a game but this game was seen to have solely copied Tetris.

Royalties.

Royalties or royalty is a usage-based payment made by one party to the owner of the copyrighted asset (someone’s intellectual property). Royalties can be a fixed price or they can be settled as a percentage of net revenue.

Also considerations are taken into account when it comes to royalties, some technological royalties can have a small life cycle and can be more valuable at the early stage.

Another fact that not many people know is that when you hear a song on the radio its not the person singing it who will get the money (unless they themselves wrote, or partly wrote the song). Royalties will go to the songwriter.

Companies like Spotify currently pay around 10% of revenue to songwriters (this is split between mechanical and performance royalties) and about 60% to the artist. On royalties (mechanical) are usually paid by the labels or artists to a third party, who then pay publishers.

Ancillary Right.

Ancillary rights are supplementary rights that stem from a primary right. This right exists depending on a claim that is reasonably linked to a main right.

Ancillary Right is a contractual agreement in which a percentage of profits made on the sale(s) of action figures, posters and T-shirts which relate to a film and or motion picture.

Article Two - Sound Design and Production.

          Sound Article.

It is hard to believe where videogames have come from, a bottomless pit of monophonic beeps, 1 bit sound and the most simple graphics if you can even call them graphics. Sound in videogames has come on leaps and bounds from its humble beginnings in the 1972 classic “pong”. This game highlights the strict limitations that videogames had to abide by, no thanks to microprocessors. On the other hand now videogames can have huge orchestral pieces and nobody bats an eyelid, bigger processing and more memory come together for a much more rich gaming experience. Games like Halo including huge orchestral symphonies, which match the epic scenes and story, confirm these technological advances.

When it comes to sound in videogames they are a whole host of ways to obtain music and sounds, this can be going into archives and libraries of already made sounds or even hiring people to make the sound for you.

Archived sounds and music, most of the time loyalties are free, meaning they wont have to pay to use it. This can be a simple thing like door openings, beeps and ambience. This can be for indie games on a budget as it lowers budget.

Also videogames with big budgets can get composers to write huge pieces of music for an orchestra to perform, they can make everything from the ambience to the soundtrack to the game.

Console Processors and limitations.

1976 saw the introduction of 8bit consoles with removable cartidges.1977 saw the debut of the Atari’s 2600, their CPU based and it was designed with 9 initial games. This would later become one of the most popular first videogame consoles.

The next major consoles in 1980 included 10bit processors and had 3 sound channels.

1982 saw consoles such as the Atari 5200, arcadia 2001 and Vectrex. The Vectrex used vector graphics and its own self managed display.

Over a few years we see the progression in processors and the consoles themselves, this made more than one music channel available and 8 bit music scores. I think it is important to understand that it was fundamentally impossible to have huge scores in early videogames, not because of lack of imagination but rather the consoles lack of technology.

Audio Recording systems.

Sound recording and reproduction is the re-creation of sound waves such as; spoken voice, sound effects and instrumental music to name a few.

Recording audio can be done in many ways but through the advancement of the videogame industry it can only be implemented in attachment to video games in certain ways, for music to e implemented in a game it must be saved or exported as a VGM (video game music) this was used in systems such as MSX and PC.

There are many different digital audio recording and processing programs for recording and editing audio, from casual to professional.

In the 1970’s saw stereo come into play. 24-32 tracks. Not much but this showed development, just as videogames were picking up pace. With the Atari 2600 coming out in mid 1977, the first real console in my opinion.

The 1980’s, saw the rise of digital mixing consoles, digital editing and Atari sequencers, 16bit/44.1khz Cd standard. Music and technology in the 80’s progressed, larger processor memory which mad recording sounds and layering easier and more true to the game. Yamaha DX7 synthesizers would of also been used in the 0’s on video games as early games majorly relied on synth, you can see this in games such as; Pac Man, Galaga and dig dug.

A chip tune, also known as chip music or 8 bit music, was a chip that was used in the late 70’s and early 80’s for VGM (video game music).

1980’s saw the first game to use DAC (digital to analog converter) meaning it produced sampled tones instead of a tone generator.

Things like the advancements in the sound recording side of the games, was down to personal computers like the commodore 64, this would have been using 64k of RAM and 16k of switchable rom, and 6510 processors, often known as “the epitome of 8 bit, this sold up to 22million units.

1985 came around quickly and bringing a new commodore with it, this just two years after the first, but the advancements in chipsets allowing them to be custom, the commodore amiga, based on a 7.16 MHz Motorola 68000 was the first home computer to have pre-emptive multitasking operating system. The PC used a single 880kb 3.5 in disk drive and 256kb of RAM.

Advances like these, random access memory and processing speed and memory see the development in music in games, adding the amount of layers that could be recorded for videogames and they did this faster and at a better quality, over the short span of maybe 15 years the advancements and possibilities have grown endlessly.

I think these developments helped the gaming community and industry a lot as the designers of the games had these intercut ideas but physically could achieve them because of the hardware but once they were able to we have seen a constant flow in gaming advancements.

File Formats.

An audio file format is a file format in which digital audio is saved on a computer. 

There are a number of different types of audio files, the most common being wave files (wav) and MPEG Layer-3 files (mp3).

The way audio is compressed and saved is called a codec this will regulate the size of the file size.

Some file types can contain jus music where as some can contain additional information, i.e. notes and other data.

The most popular type is MP3 and AAC. 

Audio Sampling.

Sampling is the process of taking a portion of sound(s) and using it and reusing at as an instrument or recording in a different piece of music.

Monotone, mono or non-stereo, this early sound system uses a signal channel for sound output. This is the most basic format of sound output.

Stereo or stereophonic is sound that is directed through two or more speakers, this is used for a more natural distribution of music.

Bit Depth, uses pulse-code modulation (PCM), bit depth is the number of bits of information in a sample and this directly coincides with the resolution of each sample.

Sample rate is basically the conversion of an analog signal into a stream of digital numbers, each number characterizing the analog signals amplitude (the loudness). Each number is called a sample, the numbers in the sample per second is called its sampling rate, and this is measured in samples per second.

Audio sampling has many constraints, this can be a legal obligation, which your music abides by, and it can be a costly affair. Music samples are not cheap, using a song or using parts from it could lead to a big pay out, this could be a percentage of profits or even a cash lump sum.

If you decide to add samples to your product without clearance, you could end up with a costly lawsuit.

A lot of people who work in the music industry see sampling as a double edged sword, it’s a hand tool to have and use but it can also bottleneck a genre of music, with an over used sample making all music sounding similar.