Tyrus: I saw you went to Full Sail. What did you study in?
Josh: I studied Recording Arts and graduated in 2007.
Tyrus: Very cool. What happened after that?
Josh: After that I was fortunate enough to land a gig right after school doing sound design for Volition Inc where I worked for 2 years. During that time I worked on Saints Row 2 and Red Faction: Guerrilla.
Tyrus: Awesome! Tell us what a typical day was like.
Josh: An average day consisted mainly of coming into the studio, seeing what tasks had the highest priority and working getting the content created and implemented into the game. This could range from several different types of items like visual effects such as explosions, weapon audio, environmental audio (ambience) and a lot more. My first month in the industry I was tasked with making audio for a poop gun for Saints Row 2. It was a bit of a culture shock to get paid to do that.
Tyrus: (laughs). I bet. Tell us how you ended up at Gearbox and what you like best about your job.
Joshua Davidson
Tyrus: That’s great. Sounds like an incredibly fun job. What inspired you to get into sound design?
Josh: For most of my teens, I spent a lot of time making electronic music and messing around with audio applications. I found myself often spending countless hours tinkering away at things, often running from the drama of high school life and finding peace through the music I was making. So it sort of had a snowballing effect on my life in the sense that it went from using basic software, to more advanced software, to having that realization that this had become such a part of my identity that I couldn’t see myself doing anything else with my life. So I went to school in Orlando at Full Sail University to get some training. While there, I really wanted to do music production. After a couple of months, I heard teachers talking about sound design for games. When I started to research the lifestyle of working in games (I was a lifelong gamer myself, so it was a secondary passion) and merging that with all the creative tools I was using to make music, it just clicked and I had to find out more. The more research I did into game development, the more I knew I had to get in, so I really focused hard on that aspect of things and that’s what lead to me getting into the industry.
Tyrus: So give us a bit more of an explanation of sound design. At Volition, it sounds like you did a bit of Foley work, so-to-speak. Is that a correct assumption?
Josh: Sound design can really encompass a lot of different practices, and for games a lot of the sounds we make have that extra step that film and other mediums don’t have, which is implementation. So as far as foley goes, yes, we’ll go into a controlled environment and capture the sounds when we have the production bandwidth to pull it off. For a majority of the time, we’ll record audio out of our synthesizers to mix into sounds we have in our libraries. At Gearbox we have a library that’s a little over a terabyte full of sounds we can comb through and mix together to come up with something new. It’s easy to find basic things like “picking up plastic thing” or something like that, but for most of the tasks that come through, especially for Borderlands, the sound just doesn’t exist in real life and taking a straight library sound verbatim will not work. So for something like a skeleton mage cloaking and decloaking, like in our latest DLC “Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep” I might do something like mix together different whooshes to give it an ethereal effect to start, then to layer in some horror personality I’ll embed a woman screaming. The player won’t pick up on it directly, but it’s sort of psychoacoustic and make sense to whoever hears it.
Tyrus: Awesome! I love the last bit you mentioned regarding audio and adding in additional effects to give a sound personality. That added depth almost sounds like “Easter eggs” of sorts. Anything deliberately put in along those lines in Borderlands 2? And if so, do you have any hints to point fans in the right direction?
Josh: Since the game is full of non-literal forms of audio, meaning we have to come up with audio for things that don’t exist in real life, we have plenty of instances of Easter-egg style things. I think my favorite sound design moment along those lines involved working on the Bnk3r boss that the players have to fight mid-way through the game. If you’re not familiar with the Bnk3r, it’s a big floating space ship robot thing that looks somewhat like a bunker. During the design process of creating him, we came to find we didn’t have anything represented in the script written up for him, so in that case it’s our job as sound designers to come up with his vocalizations. My take was to try to come up with an unintelligible language for him. He can’t speak English or we would have to localize all of his voice files by getting them recorded properly different languages, which is a process that requires coordination with 2K Games’ (our publisher) various localization departments across the world. So anyway, I drink a lot of tea, most noteably Japanese green tea. So I recorded myself screaming different Japanese tea names into a microphone, added a lot of filtering, synthesis and pitch effects audio processing to it and came up with his voice. So when you fight him, it’s just me screaming tea names the whole time, it’s not like a real language where he’s saying “DIE YOU! DIE!” or anything.
Bnk3r
Tyrus: (laughs) Fantastic! I love that your vocals are in the game! Here’s some community questions from Evil Avatar
It was a real treat that many of the voice actors from Borderlands 2 returned to reprise their roles in the expansion packs. Did Gearbox try to get anyone back that did not say “yes”?
Josh: From what I remember, everyone we asked ended up returning. We had such a simple cast of main characters before and they had very few lines, compared to other games, anyway.
Another thing that makes it easier for us to cast the same characters is all of the voice actors are locally hired from Dallas, so we can get things turned around fairly quickly once a script is finalized.
Tyrus: Borderlands is known for having a ton of different guns, clearly some of the sounds are reused as the differences in guns are often stat-based, but there are still MANY bullet, rocket, and raygun sounds to make. Did you ever get to the point that one more gun sound felt impossible?
Josh: Yes, I was tasked with a bulk of the weapon sounds in the game, including grenade mods and such. It was quite a challenge and at the very end, I was nearly spent on making them. I think it was around June of 2012 that I was wrapping up with them on a Sunday afternoon and I’m pretty sure I would go to sleep at night with gun shots still ringing in my head. The great thing about Borderlands, though, is that many of the weapon manufacturers have their interesting personalities. I would be able to make some sound other-worldly, and some downright terrestrial and modern-day, so it was a good experience to get creative with all of the concepts our design and art teams were throwing at me.
Tyrus: Borderlands is known for using voice-over during the action (which rocks!), but was it difficult to balance sound levels so that players can hear the voice-over and still have guns that sound loud and powerful?
Josh: Yes, it was very difficult to balance, but mainly due to technology limitations we had at the time. Our audio middleware system (Wwise) for future games shows plenty of promise for allowing us to really prioritize sounds based on how important they are and when it’s best to hear them. So in combat, environmental sounds will duck out of the way so the guns can have the most impact and if important mission dialog occurs, it will duck out combat audio more so it’s clear and concise. In future Gearbox games, we’re looking at streamlining our dialog system even further so the important dialog is very audible to the player at even the most intense combat cycles. That way you can laugh at all of Anthony Burch’s jokes while enjoying a good fight.
Tyrus: (laughs) Awesome. Do you guys ever hear a sound in every day life where you’re like, “We have to have THAT in our game!” I say that because there’s been times I’ve been able to pick out the sounds in real life that sound eerily familiar! (laughs)
Josh: Haha, all the time. I really want to record a koala bear. They actually sound really terrifying when they’re angry.
Tyrus: Ha! I thought you said a polar bear at first! I hope you get a chance to get the sound of a koala. I’d rather get close to one of those buggers rather than a polar bear!
Tyrus: (laughs) I sure as hell wouldn’t! Can you hint what’s in store for fans?
Josh: As far as what’s in store for fans, I can’t say much. Expect some really new, interesting things coming out of Gearbox, though. I think people are really going to dig the direction we’re taking things. It’s a very exciting time for us and we’re really happy about how the success of Borderlands 2 turned out. The studio has a very positive and inspired energy to it and we’re very confident as a whole!
Tyrus: Fantastic! Thanks for your time!
Author’s note: This interview took place in late August of 2013. Yes, I’m terrible.
I’d also like to give a special shout out to my friend Kelly who introduced me to Josh and helped make this interview happen!
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