The Intriguing Sound of Immortality – with Sound Designers Priscilla Snow and Kevin Senzaki

Indie game Immortality – released for Windows and Xbox Series X/S in August 2022 with a macOS version and release for Android and iOS through Netflix app in the works – is an interactive film video game that follows the missing fictional model-turned-actress Marissa Marcel. Using footage from three unreleased films, behind-the-scenes production footage, and interview clips, the player must find clues as to what happened to Marissa. It’s a unique game concept that developer Sam Barlow and publisher Half Mermaid Productions pulled off in spades, earning top scores and raving reviews from sites like PC Gamer, Edge magazine, and Vulture.

As a player, you watch film clips, behind-the-scenes footage, and interview clips to unravel the mystery of Marissa Marcel’s disappearance. You can rewind, pause, scrub forward/backward, enter Image Mode to move over the image and click on an actor’s face or a prop and it will match cut to another shot (in another film or in a new clip of the same film) where the person/prop appears.

Interacting with the footage is a sonic experience as well as visual. From a sound perspective, that meant editing and mixing the clips as if they were real films or interviews, and then having those soundtracks respond to the player’s actions, like slowly scrubbing forward/backward, shuttling through clips, or using different functions like Image Mode or working in the film grid.

Half Mermaid had their sound designer Priscilla Snow on board to handle the player input/UI sound and music implementation.They also brought on award-winning sound designer/re-recording mixer Kevin Senzaki to handle the linear footage segments (that the player explores in a non-linear fashion). Here, Senzaki talks about editing and mixing the fictional film and interview clips, Snow discusses the choice of UI sounds to fit the unique tone of the game, and handling the interactive sounds of manipulating the linear footage. They talk about the creative and technical challenges they faced in working with such a unique gaming concept, and much more!

IMMORTALITY Xbox Release Trailer

Can you briefly explain your responsibilities in terms of sound on Immortality?

Priscilla Snow (PS): I was split between the sound design of the “game” side of things (i.e., UI, scrubbing, match cuts, supernatural hints, managing the audio assets as a whole within FMOD, etc.) and handling the way composer Nainita Desai‘s score functioned in the game as it interacted with the player’s actions through variables.

Kevin Senzaki (KS): I covered the movie footage clips that the player interacts with – each clip being a single shot, ranging from a few seconds to several minutes in length. Rather than conventional game audio assets, I sound-designed and mixed a few hundred “very short movies.”

 

For the UI sound of scrolling through the film grid, it’s like one of those old microfilm machines for looking at old newspaper clips in the library. Was that the sound? And there are sounds of 35mm tape rustles. Can you talk about your choice of UI sounds here – what you chose, why, and your sources for the sounds?

PS: For the UI, I used a mix of library sounds and foley sounds I recorded. We were thrilled when we found a really nice library of Moviola sounds to pull from, mostly focusing on the starts and stops of sounds, and incorporating some individual clicks and mechanical elements into other parts of the UI design.

We were thrilled when we found a really nice library of Moviola sounds to pull from…

For the film sounds (heard especially when you reorganize the clips on the grid), I went down to the pharmacy and bought a roll of 35mm film and recorded a foley session using a pair of mikroUši Pro from LOM. I felt slightly bad destroying a roll of film but I was pretty happy with the results I got!

We didn’t want anything too wild for the basic menu UI, so I made some crisp mechanical clicks by combining various audio sources. The “favorite” or “unfavorite” sound was made by bending and popping the ends of the film strip using my nails. That sound was probably the simplest one in the game, haha.

 

As the player watches the clips, they can rewind the footage, pause, scrub forward/backward, enter Image Mode and use the eyeball cursor to move over the image, and then click on an actor’s face or a prop and it will match cut to another shot (in another film or in a new clip of the same film) where the person/prop appears. Can you talk about the UI sounds you chose for these actions?

PS: For the kind of “frame story” of the game – being about a piece of software that is acting as an archive of this previously lost film footage of Marissa Marcel’s three movies – a lot of focus was put on trying to evoke the feeling of working with a Moviola as you explore the footage.

The more mechanical sounds were comprised of layered Moviola sounds and occasional supplementary clicks and clacks. Bigger sounds, like pressing down the joysticks to shuttle off to the beginning or end of a clip, were really dense and satisfying to work on.

For the match cuts, we wanted things to feel a bit more magical since it is such a cool mechanic…

For the match cuts, we wanted things to feel a bit more magical since it is such a cool mechanic (genuinely, it never gets old) so I mixed some of the more literal mechanical sounds with less straightforward sounds: a ratcheting sound as if parts are moving in the machine as it zooms, a layered “whoosh” as you are thrust into the subject you selected, and an eerie, affected bell tone as the switch occurs. You’re being transported through this weird film portal that you begin to trust less and less as you continue playing the game.

 

For the linear footage (the scenes from the films, interviews, and behind-the-scenes footage), you’re working with a lot of different footage – some clips are like fully finished films while others are blocking tests, walkthroughs, or read-throughs of scenes. What were some of your challenges for sound here? Did you treat those differently in your sound work? (It’s Interesting to note that there’s score even on the blocking/walkthrough clips.)

KS: My biggest overall challenge was getting the raw production audio – contemporary digital recordings done mostly with lavalier mics – to sound convincingly like “period” boom and onboard camera microphone recordings made on different kinds of tape and film.

Each film clip in the game is meant to be the “raw” sound (in the sense that you’re watching dailies, behind the scenes, or candid footage, rather than a “finished” film), so the goal was always being as believable as possible given the fictional filming scenario of each clip. That meant some aggressive denoising for the fictional film Ambrosio, which is supposed to be shot on an old-school studio sound stage, so I removed things like planes and electric hums to create a more isolated “bubble” feel.

On the flip side, the fictional film Minsky is supposed to be shot on-location in New York City, so I added a lot of additional urban ambiences to make the audio believably “rough,” including period-accurate car-bys and sirens.

There were about a dozen different footage types with different fictional audio recording setups. The processing was done in-software with plugins; while it would have been fun to age the sound with a bunch of analog gear, it would have been impractical in terms of equipment setups and being able to do revisions on-schedule.

While the plugin chains for each footage type were different, part of the “secret sauce” was starting with Antares Mic Mod, using a ballpark-appropriate microphone model to color everything at the beginning. Then I had a series of compressors and EQ’s to shape the sound and give it an appropriate (often “crappy”) dynamic and frequency range.

I also used RC-20 Retro Color to lightly help glue the overall sound together.

There were about a dozen different footage types with different fictional audio recording setups.

Most of the footage types also had a base hiss “noise” layer that plays continuously throughout.

The most complicated chain was the Super 8 processing, where we decided to have a bit of the camera operating audible in the recordings. I had an 8mm camera effect looped, which was also used to trigger a sidechain that would slightly duck the production audio on each clatter, which sometimes lent voices a bit of a fluttery quality that felt authentically “lo-fi.”

I edited dialogue and effects with all the processing turned on, since having that context was so essential to understanding what I was doing! I quickly found that mouth noises were my mortal enemy. Anything that felt like a close proximity saliva pop or click that a boom mic might not pick up had to be removed since it broke the illusion of the microphone’s presumed proximity to the characters. Since the dialogue came out through the processing rather squashed, even subtle pops and clicks became extremely obvious and distracting.

However, on the other hand, the majority of actor movement and prop noise that’s typically removed in the dialogue edit actually lent a lot of credibility and authenticity to being old film audio, because of course, modern tools like iZotope RX didn’t exist at that time – all those awkward foot scuffs and prop bumps became added production value!

Immortality Sound Breakdown 1; song “Tutti Vampiri” by Aaron Drake

PS: The score! Nainita did a fantastic job on the music for this game. We worked early on to do lots of planning for the kind of “formula” of the music. There are three themes, each theme is tied to a thematic element across the three films. The thematic elements have a score that is tracked based on what the player is viewing as they play. As the player’s thematic score is updated by code variables, FMOD passes that info along and the music is told which theme to play, and how many layers within that theme to play. The higher a theme’s score, the more elements of that theme you will hear!

As the player’s thematic score is updated by code variables, FMOD passes that info along and the music is told which theme to play, and how many layers within that theme to play.

On top of this, each theme is broken into what we lovingly referred to as “chunks.” That is: intro, normal, subverted, and outro. Each chunk had 4 to 5 variations set to play from a random shuffling playlist (each of which has supernatural variants). Within a theme, each possible version of an individual “chunk” kept the same number of measures as its counterparts to make the FMOD loops and transitions work really seamlessly. I have no idea how this could possibly be calculated but I’d love to know the chances of two players hearing the score play in the same way!

Occasionally, we tell the music to stop playing, especially if the player has been within the same theme for a while. This is where you’ll occasionally have a short break in the music before the next theme above the minimum score threshold begins to play.

 

Some films, like Ambrosio and Minsky, are revisited quite often in the footage – did have spotting sessions to talk about the sonic direction of these “films” as you would typically with a film? Or, what was the creative collaborative process like for these? What was your workflow like?

KS: Sam Barlow, the director, had certain films in mind for “feel” reference for most of the footage types, and we had a couple of initial discussions about how clean or distressed the sound should be depending on the footage source.

Once we had our reference points, I read up as much as I could on the technology that would have been used for recording each film, and I also ran clips of our reference movies through iZotope RX and frequency analyzers to get an objective ballpark of what to aim for with each plugin chain.

Once things were generally in the right place, I fine-tuned the settings by ear and adjusted to accommodate for our actual production audio as the input source, and then sent drafts to Sam to review.

…I read up as much as I could on the technology that would have been used for recording each film…

The majority of creative iterations and changes made to the processing itself were to distinguish different footage types from one another clearly. Ambrosio is from 1968 and Minsky is from 1970, so to help subtly differentiate their sound, I made a little historical “cheat” and modeled Minsky’s processing on films using Dolby noise reduction to give a slightly better sound compared to Ambrosio.

In actuality, Dolby sound was first heard in A Clockwork Orange in 1971, so it’s a slightly anachronistic reference point. But of course, accuracy and believability are often different things!

…Sam ran the footage through an actual VHS player, sometimes multiple times to achieve authentic video degradation.

The game has some scenes that are pulled off VHS recordings of TV broadcasts, and Sam ran the footage through an actual VHS player, sometimes multiple times to achieve authentic video degradation. For those scenes, I delivered processed audio in its “pristine” but still “period-treated” form before it went to VHS, and then we ran that through the tape machine in tandem with the visuals.

I then did an edit and mix pass on the authentic VHS audio we got back, mostly for level balance and toning down pops that were overly distracting. Those shots were fun since the audio went through multiple “generations” to reach the end result!

Immortality Sound Breakdown 2

The majority of the finer notes concerned the implied off-screen fiction happening in each clip. I was working remotely (Sam’s in New York, and I’m in Los Angeles), so we did notes over frame.io on mp4 video file drafts I uploaded. Most notes were things like adjusting ambiences, adding more film crew noise, or pushing an off-screen character closer or further away from the recording microphone.

Sam had a pretty precise idea of what was happening not just in the frame but outside of it at all times, and there are a lot of narrative contextual clues for players sprinkled throughout that happen entirely with sound. There were definitely shots where I’d do a couple of rounds of Sam’s notes and then go, “oh okay, that’s what’s really happening here.”

 

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Did you record foley for these film scenes, too? Or, did you just cut hard effects for the footsteps and props since the clips are short?

KS: It was a combination of both. Generally, library foley came out sounding pretty good through the processing chains, and with a little EQ and IR reverb (which also went through the chain) it glued together pretty nicely. I’d jokingly describe the processed sound as “potato audio,” and almost anything can come out sounding like a potato if you set the EQ and level right.

I recorded the more specific foley cues with a microphone directly at my workstation, things like camera handling bumps for the Super 8 and DV camera footage, and skin contact for the more (shall we say) “intimate” sequences.

…almost anything can come out sounding like a potato if you set the EQ and level right.

As the footage is meant to be raw production sound – before a foley pass would have been done on these fictional films – foley was used pretty selectively. If it was important for clarity or to address an objective “problem” in the production audio we’d use foley, but oftentimes the approach was, “if we can’t hear it in the production sound, it’s probably realistic that we just don’t hear it.”

That might sound a little strange since, of course, foley does so much to draw us in and connect us with the characters, but in our case, an absence of foley added to the sense of authenticity and mystery, which is captivating in its own way.

 

What was the most challenging scene or clip in terms of your sound work?

KS: One of the hardest things to get right was matching in wild lines. Since the production had to shoot a huge amount of footage (I believe about ten hours in the final cut) and schedule all the cast members during COVID, a lot of off-screen lines were recorded wild on different days in different locations, so there was a lot of replacing the assistant director reading lines on the day with the actors’ reads from another. It would sometimes take a good deal of fine-tuning to get things to sit together right.

Because all the characters are seated and don’t change position during the scene, I gave each character’s track its own room tone…

The game includes some “supernatural” scenes as well, which were shot at a high frame rate and rather than being old film footage, are more like “real” (or maybe “hyper-real”) moments unfolding in front of the player, which are discovered during play. While these were easier in a way – they’re “normal” film audio in the sense that they’re supposed to sound clean and weren’t aged – they were uniquely challenging in that they often included more stylized sound design elements, and had to feel like they could be happening “live” in front of the player, without getting too close to a headphone binaural “uncanniness.” We had established pretty early on that unlike the mono audio of the old film footage, the supernatural sequences would have panning on dialogue to match the speakers’ places in the frame.

There’s a script table read scene with a half dozen characters talking that runs just over six minutes long, and I only had a mono production track to work from. It took a lot of careful work using RX to split voices apart when they overlapped, and I recorded foley to create a stereo spread when all the characters turn script pages in unison. Because all the characters are seated and don’t change position during the scene, I gave each character’s track its own room tone, so there wouldn’t be noticeable “room tone jumping” as the single chopped-up production track bounced back and forth between speakers.

 

In-game, how did you handle the reversing, slow scrub forward/backward, and shuttling sounds? These are completely interactive and respond to what the player is doing. What did this entail on the technical side?

PS: First, I want to shout out our primary programmer, Connor Carson, because she was really amazing to work with. She ensured the video player would reverse the footage while keeping two versions of the video audio (normal and reversed audio events) synced up.

…I added audio filters that took the speed variable and followed a lowpass curve to reduce the shrill ‘Mickey Mouse’ effect…

In conjunction with that, I added audio filters that took the speed variable and followed a lowpass curve to reduce the shrill “Mickey Mouse” effect that happens to the actors’ voices playing back at high speed, while also bringing the mechanical Moviola scrubbing layers up or down depending on how fast or slow the player is scrubbing the footage, and also mixing the music up or down based on what action the player is doing. We didn’t want the mechanical sounds, or the music to a lesser extent, to distract from the footage once the player was watching at normal playback speed (be it forward or reversed).

 

[tweet_box]The Intriguing Sound of Immortality – with Sound Designers Priscilla Snow and Kevin Senzaki[/tweet_box]

What were some other technical challenges in terms of sound on Immortality?

PS: When working with the music system in FMOD, as I kind of described before, the music was very layered and had many variations. With the way I needed to structure things, I kept referring to working inside those multi-layer nested events and playlists as feeling a bit like working inside a Russian doll, especially when I needed to implement something that touched every layer of the music (like the thematic score mixing that affected individual stems.) It was challenging but a lot of fun.

…working inside those multi-layer nested events and playlists as feeling a bit like working inside a Russian doll…

Outside of that, the various scrubbing sounds went through a few iterations before it really started to… click – namely in the timing and attenuation of the supernatural hinting. We wanted to be generous with the “hint range” for the player as they scrub back and forth looking for the sweet spot, and help them be able to hear how close they are to unlocking the new clip. I semi-jokingly referred to this as “scrub-picking” during development since it is essentially just another kind of video game lockpicking.

A lot of audio cues were adjusted as the gameplay mechanics became tighter, so across the board, the game really needed a lot of hand-tuning to feel responsive and natural to navigate. The match cuts for instance used to be a slower zoom. One day Sam changed the speed to be very snappy and we were like, “ok yeah, zipping around rapidly between clips is very fun.” I think it also helps to create more feelings of surprise since the players are confronted with new imagery so quickly. So once things felt good in gameplay, the audio design had to go through similar adjustments of timing.

 

What game engine did you use for Immortality? Was that a good fit for the sound team? Why?

PS: The game engine was Unity and I handled the audio within FMOD. For the most part, FMOD was pretty good for this project; I tend to prefer it to Wwise generally.

I will say there were times when, due to the complexity of the project, trying to debug something in FMOD even while using the profiler could be a little frustrating.There were a huge number of clips and variables and snapshots being handled so I had to do a lot of things on top of normal file organization, like using color coding to help keep things relatively easy to locate and track which parts had been implemented or were still waiting on assets to be delivered.

FMOD, I think, shines when it comes to interactive music implementation.

 

What are you most proud of in terms of sound on Immortality?

KS: The most rewarding thing so far is that I haven’t heard any complaints about the period film audio sounding phony! The majority of praise about the film footage has been directed towards the visuals, which I think is natural, so if the sound work is invisible and helps “sell it,” then that means I didn’t mess it up too badly!

This has been some of the most rewarding ‘player experience’ stuff I’ve seen from a project I’ve been on.

PS: So far I really find a lot of joy going and watching streamers play the game for the first time, and seeing their faces when they start to notice the low rumbles coming in. Hearing someone say, “wait wait, do you hear…what is that sound…ok, i’m going to rewind…” and then seeing them lose their minds as they stumble headfirst into the soul of the game. This has been some of the most rewarding “player experience” stuff I’ve seen from a project I’ve been on. Delightful!

I am still pretty happy with my Lynchian-inspired sound for the gameplay moment when the player breaks into the supernatural footage. I tried a couple of different sounds before this (spooky exhale, mechanical squeal, ye olde distorted scream) but when the final version was in, it felt like the right amount of disturbing. We didn’t want it to be TOO much like a jump scare. It’s less like a slap in the face and more “that feeling you get when you suddenly have overwhelming anxiety and your stomach drops.” You know, that feeling we all love and enjoy. :)

 

A big thanks to Priscilla Snow and Kevin Senzaki for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of Immortality and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

 

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