Jerry Ibottson from Media Mill on WRC Audio

Media Mill, the company behind much of the audio samples used in the last couple of WRC titles, have agreed to an interview to give us a little background on what goes into producing sound for a title like this.

Jerry, tell us a little about your company and yourself. In particular, if you could expand on your web site front page “We do more than hand over a stack of samples.”

Media Mill is an audio production company I set up in January 2000 when I left the BBC. I’d been a radio journalist for nearly a decade and was working as a reporter at Radio One Newsbeat but decided to pack it all in and go self-employed. To begin with I was mainly working as a radio freelance putting together things like documentaries, which is how I met the guys at Evolution.

Almost five years on we’ve produced all the audio for the WRC series to date. I did all the sample work and much of the sound design in WRC 1 & 2 on my own, with coding done by a guy at Evolution. Now we’ve grown into a bigger company with two other sound assistants, Tim and Mickey. Tim joined the team last year and Mickey has been with us since summer 2004.

We don’t just provide a disc full of samples. We design, in partnership with coders at Evolution, just how the game will sound. That means working out how each audio sample is triggered and how it plays. Getting the sound design and code right is at least half the battle. For example, it means deciding how to ‘drive’ the car audio or how to make the cheering crowds behave.

Prior to WRC audio, did you have any experience of computer gaming/rally games? Did you have a favorite rally game and did it influence the audio design?

I’d never worked on a game before I met the team at Evolution. I played a lot of other games as work began on WRC1 but I really didn’t have any favorite. It meant I could approach the sound work on WRC with an open mind. That sounds grand but it really means I made it up as I went along!

Something of a sense of humor and some mad photos jump out of your web-site. Have you ever managed to get that humor across into the audio (or been tempted)?

There are some ‘special’ audio effects in the game that will only be accessible via secret codes. I can’t say too much but they do involve some slightly mad alternatives to car fx and co driver samples. In the ‘normal’ game listen for the cowbells and ski-run style crowd chants in Sweden.

Do you have a preference for racing games? Would you actively seek work on other racing games?

We love enjoy working on vehicle audio at Media Mill, although we do produce other game audio material as well. I can’t say what work I’m seeking at the moment but we are working on a game for the forthcoming Sony PSP.

What limitations are most frustrating for you when being told what is required for the size/scope of the audio?

Ask anyone who’s ever worked on audio for a console game and the one thing that will make them roll their eyes is sample memory. On a PS2 you have 2 megabytes to get all your audio samples into at any given time. In a game like WRC4 it means to have to identify which sounds are most important and give these the highest sample rate you can, while less important sounds use a lower one. Also you have to fight with the rest of the game for processor power so, as a rule, applying real time effects beyond volume and pitch changes is out of the question. They would slow down the rest of the game.

Are Evo Studios rigid in telling you what they want? For instance can you decide how many samples make an engine sound or how many frequencies a sample can be reproduced at?

Evolution leave it up to us to make the game sound good using whatever methodology we see fit. Having said that, we do work alongside coders who tell us what is going to work in the game and what isn’t. At the end of the day if Evolution don’t like what they hear then they tell us and we rework it until they do like it. But they’ve allowed us to build a distinctive ‘sound’ for all the WRC games by letting us be as creative as we can be. It’s a very good working relationship based on the fact that we all want to make the best game we can.

Do you ever fudge a sample to make it sound more effective because the actual sample doesn’t sound right somehow? (hope that makes sense!)

Our aim is to make the game sound as close to the real thing as possible, not like a synthesized ‘interpretation’ of a rally car. Our samples are taken from real cars, from JWRC to full-on WRC. But we still have to take account of things like the sample ending up on a PS2 and coming out of someone’s TV, a low sample rate and of course the real car not sounding exciting enough to begin with! That means we do apply filters and compressors to samples and generally monkey about with them just to bring out their best sound.

I can guarantee you that if you drive, for example, a Lancer WRC in the new game and hear it tearing down the road: that IS the sound a Lancer WRC makes. You’re hearing (as close as dammit) the exact sound of that car in those conditions. Likewise the Focus sounds like a crazed bumblebee because… so does the real thing. I’ve been recording that car for four years now and it always amazes me how utterly mad it sounds!

For all round realism though I’d say this year’s Xsara tops it. Inside the car the engine makes what we call a ‘buzzsaw’ noise while the outside sound is a real ‘bark’. All samples are taken directly from our recording of the car blasting round the Citroen test track at Versailles in May of 2004. We hear people say things like ‘the cars sound nothing like the real thing’ and frankly we just laugh. It sounds arrogant but it’s better than weeping into our beer.

For the audio technical buffs out there, would you tell us exactly what equipment you find works best for you?

We don’t use anything terribly exciting. For location recording I still use Minidisc because it’s what I used in the BBC (I’ve sent Minidisc recorders up in jet fighters and recorded riots with them) and for the kind of recording we do the quality is excellent. Purists will say only DAT will do, but plonk one in a WRC car on a Welsh mountain and you’ll be left picking up lots of small pieces. I once lashed two Minidisc Walkmans (or it is Walkmen?) into Petter Solberg’s Subaru for 45 minutes a few years back and only lost one second of recording – when he hit a tree!

In our sound workshops we use a range of gear, from full professional equipment to consumer kit. To be honest these days many home studios use supposedly ‘pro’ gear so the line between the two is getting very blurred! Our main audio software is Adobe Audition 1.5. This is a very powerful package and we use it for all our editing and sample tuning, voice recording (for the co driver) and audio for the game’s animated scenes (rally win celebrations).

What improvement in WRC 4 over WRC 3 are you most proud of?

The most significant changes in the audio for WRC4 have taken place with the cars. We’ve always been pleased with our car audio – making it more realistic than many of our rivals – but we felt we needed to shift up a gear for WRC4 and really focus on this crucial area of the game. We binned all our old sound code and samples and built a new tool for designing the car audio. One thing we picked up on from WRC 3 is to give the player more aural feedback on what the engine is doing, particularly on the internal views (driver/bonnet/bumper). With the new sound system the engine changes tone massively from low to high revs so you know when you’re revving hard. If you play the game in manual gearbox mode you’ll know when to change up because the engine should start screaming for mercy!

The gearbox is also better. In a real WRC car you hear the gears whirring inside the car and they really stand out when the engine revs drop. That should come across more than ever in WRC4. We even have different sounds for the gearbox and back axle in the four wheel drive cars: try hammering the Impreza WRC or Focus round some slow bends then down a long straight and you’ll hear the gears whirring then the axle whine kick in.

One thing we’ve noticed is the fact that when people hear the inside of a WRC car on TV the sound is fed directly from the drivers’ intercoms. That’s why it sometimes sounds very filtered, as the microphones are very small; placed very close to the drivers’ mouths and miss out a lot of frequencies. Our sound is recorded from hi-quality mics inside the car (handheld by one of us sitting in the co-driver’s seat!) so it’s more full-on. Having been a passenger in almost every current WRC car at some point, I can tell you it’s deafening in there, even with a helmet on.

One of the best new sound features is the directional system. The cars sound different when they come towards you, with a muffled whirr of engine and gears, compared to when they are blasting away from you and you’ve got the exhaust pipe pointing at your ears. It’s quite a subtle effect but you notice the change as the car swings past; try turning down the replay music and listen as a car hammers past on, say, the Bosenberg stage in Germany. You can even hear it on the start-line sequence when the camera is panning around the car.

Combine it with the new Doppler code (the change in pitch as a vehicle moves toward you / away from you) and it all sounds much more realistic. It seems very technical but watch a replay video and you’ll understand. It’s about making it seem real and natural.

What technical/hardware/software has changed to make WR4 better than it’s predecessors?

Obviously the PS2 hardware is the same as ever but we have used some new tools (running on our PCs) to design how the audio works. We had something a lot more basic before, although the principle is the same: we tune the sound of each car in the game until we are happy with it. Then we tune some more! The tool lets us say to the PS2 “Use this sample at X pitch and Y volume only when A or B happen in the game”. It means we can add nice touched like letting you hear the brakes squeak as you slow down to a stop or the clutch rattle when you’re in neutral.

In an ideal scenario, what would you like to be able to add to the WRC audio which either the hardware or developer cannot allow (ie what might we have to look forward to in future)?

The PS2 has only 2 megs of sample memory some more would be better. It also would struggle to apply real time effects like filters and echo when it’s drawing a game as graphically detailed as WRC4 so a more powerful processor would be welcome then we can change the way a sample sounds (for example if the car’s damaged) or add echo as you drive through a French village.

Is the audio for WRC4 complete?

Yes!

Getting back to ‘next gen’. Sony have announced there will be a PS3 and have announced various tid-bits and of course submitted their patents for a 1 Tflop multi-cell machine. Next gen consoles are due for public formal announcement (it seems) around Spring for a release 2006. Evo’s have signed an exclusivity agreement with Sony and are hiring for ‘next gen’ games. You can see where this is going! Can you hint or tell us anything about development on next-gen systems?

Nope. Not just because it’s all top secret but because we don’t know. I’ve not yet seen a PSP even though we’re working on a PSP game for another studio. I want one though, so form a queue behind me…