Audio in Video Games

After researching through how the audio is created in video games I have found that the majority of game developers use the popular recording software called Pro Tools. Pro Tools is mostly used by studio producers for recording music as well as mixing and mastering the audio tracks. There are a lot of plug-ins for Pro Tools that are essential for making the sounds that are heard in video games and some of the most popular ones are: Pitch 'n Time, Pultec EQ, McDSP, FilterBank and Compressor Bank, Waves and Altiverb.
Altiverb is used for sampling acoustic spaces and is mostly used for voicing effects to make them sound more organic and realistic. Pultec is used to dirty up sounds with heavy compression, so it's used to create gritty effects like footsteps on a dirt and gravel road or the sound of a campfire burning with the crackling sounds of the firewood. These plug-ins allow you to twist sounds with gritty, realistic sounding effects while still maintaining the organic feel of it.
A lot of sound designers don't actually go out and record their sounds themselves. Most designers typically rely on their library of sounds when creating sound effects because it is more efficient. They just have to get even more creative when editing them to make them sound unique and original. When field recording is done by hiring studios to go out and do the field recording for them and all of the sound effects we hear in video games are almost always recorded in a studio.
The process of recording sounds and implementing them into a video game is as follows: Recording, editing, creation of the in-game audio system, implementation and finally balancing. A sound designer must have a very good relationship with the animators and visual effects team, because one change in animation could mean a whole group of sounds must be replaced for new ones so the animation can perfectly match up with the paired sound for that animation. A games audio is not done in post-production but along with the development of the game, so it's very important to keep track of the work flow between animators and sound designers.

Wright Brothers, The First In Flight

By: Nick Frendzel

The Wright brothers, two ingenious brothers have made the first human flight possible! They have invented the worlds first practical fixed-wing aircraft, which means it's the first aircraft to feature aircraft controls. They achieved this great feat on December 17, 1903, in Kitty Hawk, NC, in which they made 2 successful flights from ground level.  The first flight flew for 37 m and lasted for a whole twelve seconds!

The Sound of Video Games

     How a game designer creates the sound effects that we hear in video games has always interested me. It's really cool to look behind the scenes and see what a designer had to go through to create a particular sound, from a gunshot to the sound of a character's footsteps moving about the game world, there's no telling what the designers actually did to get the final product of a certain sound.
     That is what I am going to be focusing on for my research and I will be investigating various types of video games via interviews and exclusive content that is released online to find out what is done to create these sound effects. I will focus more on the action/adventure genre because that is definitely the most action packed and exciting types of video game, which will also provide more opportunities to see what developers do to obtain the sounds that are in these video games

CBS - Wordpress

     The website that I chose to review that uses Wordpress is the CBS New York website. Looking at this site initially I couldn't tell that it was a website that used Wordpress. I feel like I should be able to spot when a website uses Wordpress, but apparently Wordpress can really look like anything if the designer wants it to.
      This website looks like many other websites that I have seen before. With that being said, this website is not very pleasing to the eye and it has the feel of an older website from the year 2000 or something. There are no drop down menus, the website just has a basic horizontal menu bar located at the top of the page. I know that this is a news website, so there has to be a bunch of stories on the main page, but all of the stories are very scattered throughout the home page and have no structure to them. It looks like they just threw text about in random places on the page and isn't very pleasing to the eye. If someone would come to this site for the first time it might be a little discouraging to try and find a certain story, but thankfully they added a search bar at the top right of the home page.
      The navigation of the site isn't too bad, it operates like you'd expect a site to navigate, so no problems there. My main problem is the look of the site. I think that if this site was constructed with something like Drupal, it could be further customized into a site that looks more professional and organized.

Ideas for graphic novel

I want to make a graphic novel that depicts my everyday life with my band. I was going to take pictures of me and my best friends and just make up some story because I thought that would be the easiest way to do things. But then I realized that my best friends are my band mates, so I thought it would be a good idea to just make a day in the life graphic novel of what we do. My novel would include us hanging out, practicing, being on the road, and playing shows. I'm going to have to formulate some story that will be taking place behind all of our regular activities. So I was thinking that there is a big show that we have to get ready for, and this show is coming up fast. So we barely have enough time to get ready and we're stressed and we're late for the show, which we are eventually late for. In between us getting ready for the show a whole bunch of bad things happen, but in the end we get over the obstacles and everything is alright. Those are my basic ideas so far for my graphic novel and I'm sure to have more ideas come to me eventually, so I'm going to start with what I have now and expand.

My 3 graphic novel choices

The graphic novel that I am most excited about is Black Hole. I actually just picked this one up a few weeks ago, but I haven't started to read it yet. I'm not a big graphic novel person, but I'm just starting to get into them. This one has really caught my attention though, because of the craziness I've seen just flipping through the pages. All I really know about this one is that it's about some STD that mutates people. It should be a good read. Another one that I wanted to check out was Blankets. I've read through the plot online and it's a very real story. I really wanted to read one of these novels and get a real life (or something close to it) story out of it. I'm excited to get into this one. Exit Wounds is the final graphic novel that I want to get my hands on. It seems like it will be a very raw story and that's what I'm looking for. With these graphic novels I wanted to make three choices that weren't similar to each other. And I think that I've picked some really good ones.

Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is the only web development tool that I have used. So far the program has given me a multitude of problems, but I don't blame the program itself. Last semester I learned the basics of coding and we weren't taught how to use anything that we are going to learn this semester. I know that learning these new things on Dreamweaver will also give me a bunch of problems but I'll get through it. I wouldn't say anything that I have learned so far is necessarily difficult, just tedious. But I expect this class to be much more difficult and I'm up for the challenge.