KY: Ah, right. Yeah, there are a lot of games with in-game cutscenes where the mic is slavishly tied to the camera, and the cuts are criminal - it really jars. But I suppose you have the flexibility to place the mic wherever you want.

PK: Yes. I’ve got to give a shoutout to Neil on this, because he - and this kicked me in the shins at the time, because I just wanted to be done - but he actually would not approve the final mixes until the camera metadata was done and the correct backgrounds were playing through the cinematics properly. Because he wanted to make sure that his scene played out the way he wanted his scene to play. And, you know what? That’s frickin’ awesome. Because when you’re in the thick of it and you have 5000 other things to think about, you don’t want something else piled on to you but, at the same time, it’s so important to have all the pieces of the puzzle in place before you sign off on it.

KY: Man, I’m so glad I asked you about that because that answer was a lot more interesting than I was expecting! OK, so, going back to the pillars of the mix in The Last of Us, because we kinda went off on one there...

PK: [laughs] OK, so... just as with any Naughty Dog game, dialogue is king. So we wanted to make sure that we could hear the dialogue and understand what was going on, but it had to do so within the constraints of the environmental audio technology that we were trying to create.

KY: Could you talk a bit more about that - what were the challenges you faced here?

PK: There were a couple of things we did a bit differently for dialogue in The Last of Us. Early on we decided that we were going to create a more natural fall-off model. We didn’t have a curve editor tool, so it was all numbers in a text file, but we had the ability to change the fall-off curve for each individual sound at will. We worked for a long time on the fall-off curves for dialogue, taking in to account the size of the maps, the different setups in each area, whether it was interior or exterior, all these different considerations, so that you could really hear the human enemies in the mix. But then once we started working with Neil Druckmann, the creative director, on the sound of the infected and how scary they were going to be we found that the kind of falloff curves we’d been applying to the human enemy dialogue didn’t work on the infected’s vocalizations - it just wasn’t very scary to be able to hear the infected from far away. It communicated that there were infected present but that there was nothing to worry about, and that really diminished the power and meaning of those sounds. The infected are at their scariest when they are on your ass - with a character like the clicker, it’s just one bite and you’re done, it’s a one hit kill - so what we wanted was for the player to associate the sound of the infected with an immediate threat. So, they said to us “yeah, everything we told you about the dialogue for the game - that doesn’t work for the infected. Figure it out.” So, Jonathan and I had to go back to the drawing board and talk about how we were going to make the dialogue not behave like dialogue!

JL: Yeah, we couldn’t just split them out on different fall-off curves. If we’d done that then you’d get weird situations like hearing your buddy reacting to getting attacked but not hearing the infected doing the attacking! So we knew we had to make the falloff curves match up when you are interacting with the infected. But we couldn’t just drop the buddy dialogue to match the infected vocalizations because the buddy dialogue had to be loud and audible to make sure any exposition was coming across. And we didn’t want any mix inconsistencies as a result of abrupt changes in state, like your buddy sounds loud and then all of a sudden they sound quiet as soon as you’ve wiped out all the infected. So that was where the whole parametric dynamic range technique came in to play, because what we decided to do instead was split the curves out but we would blend them over time to match each other when you were interacting and then unblend them back when the infected were gone. That way we could tune the two curves separately, and the blend would happen slow enough for it not to be noticeable. Even when you know it’s there it’s very hard to hear because it’s very subtle.