The Making of Quiet - Silent But Violenet

I've wanted to do a "Making Of" for a while. There's a lot of ambiguity about the way I do audios, and I am often surprised how much people assume my process is simply finding stock sound effect and placing it on timeline. The reason I am so fond of this audio is that, from a technical perspective, it's my finest work... so let's dive into it!

We will start with a more general overview of what audio making actually looks like, for me. I have a large library of disparate sound effects. Some are just "complete" fart and scat sounds, from either JAVs or people's personal recordings. But for the most part, truly great sound cannot be achieved with just one sound effect. Let's take a listen to this sound from the Solid alt.

This is what it looks like on a timeline. That is 11 sounds layered together. I've identified them by color to denote what they do.

• Brown is genuine scat or scat stock effects from movie scenes.

• Yellow is what I call "soundalikes." Foley audio that SOUNDS like scat, but is very much not. In this case, they're plops, mostly from fruit or jello being handled. Pitching them down helps with the girth-y sound.

• Blue is any water effect. Sloshing water bottles, bathwater being disturbed, etc.

• Pink is slime - gak or other oozy toys that produce a soft, squishy sound when handled.

• Layering all of them to sound both satisfying and natural takes a lot of time. I'd wager a single one of these sounds takes up to 20 minutes to compose, not including balancing them so no sound is too loud or quiet. I cannot easily re-use them and get the same quality, either, since I have to mix to the voice actresses' deliveries. Hence, the 30-45 seconds of pooping you hear might take an entire 8-hour workday to complete.

• I like to have a few elements that help beef up my sound effect game

  • Punch: This is a harsh, "brick wall" type solid sound at the start of the audio. You can identify it by a large, blocky waveform. Farts, for example, need to have a harsh start to really sound like they're bursting out.

  • Trail. This is the body of the sound effect. Here you want a much longer, continuous sound.

  • Contributors: Sound effects that help give texture to the audio. For example, even though a plopping log might make a splash in the toilet, I add a little bit of slime to it to make the water sound like it is settling.

  • "Punctuation:" A cute little "button" type sound, such as a short, buzzy fart or a tiny plop. This is mostly a bit of personality, as its something I find erotic. I hope you do as well!  

This is the workflow for all audios, but for aspects specific to the Quiet audio, let's go over some of the details.

The idea began from a Patron backer's suggestion to use humming to depict desperation. It immediately struck me as an interesting challenge, and it was a necessary exercise as I used to focus too much on dialogue. When writing a script featuring a non-verbal character, I had to find a way to communicate emotion to AkujiSaitoVA. So I actually wrote dialogue for Quiet, then reduced it to a single sound, such as a grunt or a groan of annoyance.

For it to work, I knew the audio needed to sound identical to The Phantom Pain, or as close as possible. Which is a difficult task, to replicate something of a studio quality with consumer-grade equipment and none of the conditions necessary for foley. So I data-mined the game for the sounds I wanted. This was a laborious process because most file names are labeled in numbers, such as 0028, which could equate to absolutely any sound in the game. Thankfully the game's file structure made it easy to determine what comes from where, but I still had to listen to most of them. People who played MGSV may not recognize the "Easy, easy! Whoa, whoa!" that Venom Snake uses, because it is an unused audio file!

However, some sounds were impossible to source. So I had to go in game and record them. Only problem is, Japanese games are not famous for their audio options. I often had to create ideal sonic environments myself. The "headshot" sound effect was actually captured by dragging a guard into a building at night, where the environmental audio was a lot more serene, and shoot him in the back of the head at close range, then clean whatever noise was left. Other effects pulled from the game and cleaned "by hand" include the snap of the horse reigns (taken from a cutscene in Episode 1: Phantom Limbs), The Supply Drop, Snake crawling, and Quiet's laser sight.

One particular sound I actually had to re-create from soundalikes is the sound of Quiet's "mask" appearing and disappearing. I could never track down all the layers used in the effect, so I constructed it with sounds from MGSV, and soundalikes from Mortal Kombat 9.

The dialogue between the Russians is actually about Quiet. It goes:

"Have you heard about the women by the power plant?"

"No, what woman?"

As well as radioing in to report a sniper in the area. I spent 4 hours listening to every Russian audio file in the game to identify this conversation through phonetics, since I myself cannot speak Russian. Finding both sides of the conversation was quite the ordeal, but I would feel bad if any Russian listeners overheard it and realized I pulled two random sounds. I also made sure to use the takes calling into CP where they identify themselves as "Patrol" and not "Dmitri 1" since this audio doesn't take place near a Russian outpost.

To create a sense of distance, I used reverb, FFT filters with a lowpass to cut off some of the high pitched sounds lost in an echo, and panning to position all audio further to the left or right of the listener. When Snake is crawling, you can hear him move from your left ear to your right if you listen carefully!

For Quiet's gas, I tried to give it a bit of progression, starting more solid and high pitched, but getting choppier and wetter as she gets closer and closer to an accident. This, however, caused some difficulty with the "Reflext Mode" sound, as a choppy part cannot be easily pitch-bent. I used a more solid, buzzy fart, but in my opinion it does not sound very good...

Since Quiet is pooping into a bucket, I needed to use different sounds than normal. There could only be a small amount of water splashing, so most "toilet" sounds were out of the question. I wanted to make it sound like the bucket was filling up, so I used less and less water per every log dropped to the best of my abilities. I'm not too sure I did a great job!

For the diarrhea alt, however, I wanted to incorporate MORE water into each pass, to make it sound like she was filling the bucket up with, well, diarrhea.

Being this meticulous is often a chore, and I often question why I work so hard. But in truth, there is no worse feeling than releasing something I am not proud of. And I have never been more proud of an audio than this one. I still have a lot to learn, and there are elements I wish I had done better, but that is the case for all of my work. But it was exhilarating, to dig through game files, set up perfect sound conditions inside the game itself, and push my limits to make something that sounds authentic to a game I care a lot about.