augusti 14th, 2009

Case: Swedish Armed Forces Recruitment Portal

Swedish Armed Forces #3 (DDB/Acne Digital)
rekryt.mil.se/

It is not often you get the privilege to work with projects were you have been a part of the picture long before you were aware of it, but with this project we got the feeling that Acne Digital had us in mind when discussing the site with the agency (DDB Stockholm).

The site is a recruitment portal for the Swedish Armed Forces, and the basic concept is that you adjust six parameters (leadership, practical work, environment, physical challenges, mechanical skills, information handling) to make them match your personality. Depending on the settings different roles/positions that match your personality are shown.

On the surface it seems like any other portal, it has a nice and clean user interface and lot’s of useful information. But after that it gets dirty.
    The screen is splattered with grit, mud and water, the interface rumbles of explosions, the mouse pointer disappears and is only seen as a radar blip, etc etc, all these changes depending on the setting.

What we did
We did the project and production management for everything that sounds on the site. We created the whole sound solution including the logic controlling it (some of the graphics are actually controlled by our logic). We made most sound production internally, but since we were on coke (the Impossible made Possible site that is, not the one you go to jail for) we got some help from Axel at Jättemedia. As usual we did all editing, mastering, track-laying and mix.

Our idea
The basic idea was that all the settings should also affect the sound. The first idea was that you should hear the sound effects for the control you are adjusting. It would for sure have been a nice effect. But we were thinking bigger. We wanted to see how far we could stretch things. Our goal was to build a totally dynamic soundscape that should illustrate the settings and roles as closely as possible. Just how dynamic and interactive could we make it?

Where to start?
Some basic ideas were obvious from the start. The environment parameter can be air, land, amphibie, water and under water. This settings has very strong associations to sound and they should affect the soundscape a lot; for air there were air planes and helicopters, for under water there were submarines, scuba divers etc. You get the idea, let’s move on… :-)
    Since working in an office with airplanes and being an attack pilot are two quite different jobs we wanted to illustrate this. Since there were no parameter for this we assumed that the less practical work and physical challenges you had tuned in the longer from the front lines (e.g. the actual war) you wanted to be . So how should this ”battle” parameter affect the sound? For example it would be ok with airplane sounds even when you are far from the front line, but the airplanes should not come as often and they should not be as close as if you were a helicopter pilot which is in the middle of living hell (maybe not in the Swedish Army, but anyway.. :-)) So the battle parameter should affect the sound scape indirectly by affecting the level of the sounds, the frequency of them and what sounds to be played.

This meant that we could not use loops but had to have separate sounds that we controlled and mixed at runtime.

The leadership parameter was quite abstract but we choose to use voices communicating in the same room or over the radio. Mechanical skills had mechanical sounds (!) and information handling had sounds from computers and other electronic equipment. All three were affected by the level of the setting getting more intense at higher settings affecting, volume, frequency and sounds.

Physical challenge was illustrated by a shadow that was standing still at the lowest position and gradually increasing speed until running at full speed at the highest setting. We just added some nice boots on gravel for this one, please note the sync with the animation, very smooth speeding up and down :-)

Coming up and going down
When you change the control for environment and move from one level to another, e.g. from under water to water, a transition sound effect is played, like when you actually are coming up after a dive. And the other way around too. All these transitions have their own sound effects.

Waves, mud and grit
When you are on water waves are coming and splashing on the screen etc. These graphical effects are controlled by our logic since we need to change the frequency depending on other settings

Explosions
The explosions are also controlled by our logic. The frequency is changed, but more important, the type of explosion is changed depending on other settings. E.g. if you are under water the explosion is an under water explosion (!).

Making it sound organic
We never use the same sound twice. Or more accurately we nevere use the same sound again until you have forgotten how it sounds. The result is a dynamic and organic feeling that sounds more real and natural than any loop.

Oh, what a nice chaos
So far we have just added sounds, more sounds and even more sounds. So if we stopped there the result would be just chaos, white noise, very irritating and not good for our business. So now we must create some order in the universe we created.

The first step was to change volume on sounds depending on which control you were adjusting. The two outer controls are actually only active when you are changing them, otherwise they are faded into silence. The center control is the environment and is the basis for all sounds, so this should be there all the time. However, when adjusting the other controls the sounds are lowered to make room for the additional sounds. When a role is opened the sounds are getting more cal, and when a movie starts all but a soft ambience disappears. When going back the sounds returns.
The sound for the shadow is only there when you are on land. The explosions are silent if we are far from the front. Etc etc.

And on the seventh day…
So it was all done. now it is up to the user to create the sound scape at runtime using some +300 sounds, at any give moment some 15-30 sounds are playing, controlled and mixed, and we can just lay back and relax, we have done our part and we are quite happy with the result.