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Since we have been working on a set of Kontakt instruments for Audiomotif I became more and more interrested in Kontakt as a sound design tool. While mainly engineered towards chromatic instrument simulations — Kontakts built in effects and scripting language allows you to create very effective sound design tools. Besides sound design tools designed for post production there is also a new line of synth’s and drum instruments coming out next month. (Audiomotif — Electro Tech Vol 01)

What else but a bee would be our simulation? A freebie bee — Right enough with the wordplay. The instrument is using a HP filter to mimic the size of the insect (more bass equals a bee — medium a wasp and only high’s for a fly). There is panning control and X-Y shifts; going from wide to narrow relative of it’s center. There is an EQ section you can use to enhence some frequencies when using a more extreme pitched keys (C1>C2 — C5>C6). The sample used is a synthesized sound and is being looped.

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We were brought in by games localisation firm Babel Media this summer, to work on a very large dialogue post production project for Bethesda softworks. Our job was to work alongside Babel’s internal audio team to clean up and edit audio dialog and cutscenes.

We are very proud to announce we’ve been working on the awesome Super Moshis trailer for the hugely popular online game and virtual world Moshi Monsters. Moshi Monsters is developed by Mind Candy, and it’s a virtual world where anyone can adopt and care for their own pet monster. The game has seen an explosion of growth since its launch 2 years ago, and currently counts over 27 million subscribers! Yes, that is, in pure subscription numbers, almost 3 times the size of World of Warcraft…

We had great fun working on this trailer, as we immediately loved the art direction and character design. So let’s hope the kids love the result as much as we loved working on it

We did all sound design, the music editing and the mix.
Some of the moshi monster voices were kindly provided to us by Mind Candy, and we edited those sounds to match the on-screen action. Other characters did not have any audio for their vocalisations yet so we created those ourselves.
Royalty free music was licenced by stockmusic.net.

Other credits:
Director/Animator – Wip Vernooij
Animator – Cako Facioli

Besides being occupied by our audio work we sometimes share a bit of our knowledge, field expeditions and sounds. This last month Daan has been busy recording all sorts of things and started a blog on his personal website. It’s a great opportunity to see how we like to spend our time, looking for new sounds and ideas. Make sure you check out the article “Pumps, engines and Tesla Coils”.

A little less new but also news worthy is Durk’s video tutorial “Massive Wobble Bass Explorations”. In this tutorial you can learn how to make Native instruments vst synth Massive wobble like we all love in dubstep and drum n bass. The tutorial is doing quiet good and is approaching the 100.000 views mark on Youtube!

We’re happy to announce that we have been working on Dead Space Ignition this summer. Dead Space Ignition is a prequel to the highly anticipated Dead Space 2, and is released for PS3 and Xbox 360 through PSN and XBLA. It’s basically a collection of minigames with animated comics in between, that tell the story of the events leading up the the start of Dead Space 2.

We created all in-game sound effects for this game, apart from a few sounds that were taken from the original Dead Space. Also, we’ve worked on about half of the game’s animated comics: editing the music, dialogue and sound effects (using a library of Dead Space legacy sounds for creatures and weapons, and adding our own sound design where needed), and mixing all elements to create the finalised sound tracks.

The Audio Guys hired us for this project. The game is developed by Sumo Digital and published by EA.

Although there’s a fair amount of reviews online for this game, so far we’ve only found one that comments on the sound (well there’s other reviews where the dialogue is mentioned, but we weren’t involved in the recording of that):

“Sound: 8.
[...] the sound effects are good.” IGN

We were brought in by games localisation firm Babel Media to work on the dialogue post production of multiple localisation SKU’s for Blizzard’s hugely popular Starcraft 2. Our job was to work alongside Babel’s internal audio team to clean up and edit VO recordings, apply various stages of FX processing and mix and balance the dialogue into the game’s cutscenes.

Image copyright Blizzard Entertainment.

After about 3 months of being offline, the Audiomotif website is finally live again. Our former website was hacked by some joker, leaving all our files infected with a virus. This essentially meant we had to rebuild everything, but because we were so busy with work (which is a good thing), we simply did not find the time. Of course after 3 months it was really taking too long, so we have now managed to take out extra hours and put everything back together…

So what has been happening?
We have completed a lot of projects, some of which we can already talk about – you can find these in the news section… As soon as we can talk more about the other projects, we will of course update our site.

Meanwhile, to give a taste of what we are currently working on:

- a short film with gorgeous direction of photography
- a PSN/XBLA title of a very well known and frankly awesome games franchise
- a PC browser based adventure game
- various iPhone games
- dialogue post production on a triple A console title

There are also multiple projects in the pipeline for the upcoming months.

Canadian games developer Juicy Beast are known for their quirky, funny Flash games. Their latest title, Feed the King, to be released for iPhone and Flash, features their trademark cute/comic design style and addictive game play. Audiomotif created all sound effects for this upcoming title.

More info and gameplay examples to follow when the game is officially released.

Image copyright Juicy Beast

Games developer Future Games of London brought us in to do a small batch of sound effects for part 2 of their very successful iPhone title, Hungry Shark. Hungry Shark is a cool looking game with fun gameplay, and has been doing pretty well on the AppStore, so well done to the guys at FGOL!

Image copyright Future Games of London

For a period of 2 months during Spring 2010, we worked in-house at Supermassive Games offices in Guildford, UK. We were tasked with managing the post production of speech assets for three of their games, Start the Party! (PS3), Tumble (PS3) and Big Match Striker.

Image copyright Supermassive Games