This has been a great project to work on and we’re looking forward to seeing the game step into the spotlight.

Meanwhile we’ve been hard at work on Howl’s Moving Castle, the stage production being performed at Southwark Playhouse in London from the 28th November until January 7th.

The production, based on the children’s book by Diane Wynne Jones, fuses live action and projection and the audio is in 5.1 surround.  That means we get to create some fabulous ambient sounds that should wrap themselves around the audience in this unique space – under the arches at London Bridge.

The play’s been created by Davy and Kristin McGuire and the original music has been composed by Fyfe Dangerfield of The Guillemots. The narration for the play is being recorded by Stephen Fry no less.

It’s our first step into the world of theatre and it’s  turning out to be brilliant!

Work continues on Little Deviants.  We had a brief break from creating sound effects for the game while we got stuck into the intro movie and end sequence, providing sound design and the overall mix (with music by the excellent Richard Jacques).  We pulled out all the stops on this, making sure we found the right sound for some of the key elements, including a “chugging” space ship and a giant lightning-bolt-super-destructo-machine.  We also had fun with the Deviants’ voices, which has had the benefit of helping us nail down how they’ll sound in-game.

What else are we doing? We’ve recorded and produced an hour long audio drama for York’s award winning Pilot Theatre. The production will be streamed into headphones in the foyer and bar area of York Theatre Royal. We recorded actress Rachel Spicer reading “My Name is Rachel Corrie”, the dramatisation of the diaries, letters and emails of an American peace activist who died in Israel in 2003.  We then edited the material, mixed it and added effects and extra elements.  It’s due to go live in a few weeks.

We’ve also been signed up to do the sound design for a new stage version of “Howl’s Moving Castle” at the Southwark Playhouse in London.  HMC was originally a children’s book, then an animated film. This production has some stunning 3d artwork and back-projection and we should be starting work any time soon.

Oh, and we’re now on Twitter as MMAudio. Do stop by.

LD is being developed by our old friends, and longstanding partners, Bigbig Studios in Leamington.

It’s set to be a launch title for the PlayStation Vita (otherwise known as NGP or PSP2) and makes good use of all that the new machine has to offer.

Have a look at the official Little Deviants E3 2011 trailer.  SFX and mix by Media Mill;  music by the superb Richard Jacques.

For the second year in a row, Media Mill has been shortlisted for a prestigious Develop award in the category of audio outsourcer.

These are the top awards in the UK and European game development industry.

Read the full story.

Our  work often comes in batches. This time last year we were up to our eyes in car recording for games like Driver, WRC, Split Second and then Motorstorm Apocalypse. Then we spent months working on various audio-for-animation projects such as Shogun 2 Total War and MSA again.

In recent weeks our attention has been focussed on voice recording – we’ve done a string of corporate voice overs for a number of companies. including a bank and a mobile phone firm.

A game audio company doing corporate voice overs? Well yes. We’ve always been about more than just game audio, given Jerry and Louise’s background in the BBC. Jerry himself still does voice work. In fact he’s just created a Facebook page on that very subject.  Ooh get him, the old smoothie.

We’ve also just become proud owners of a rather glorious new studio mic, an SE 5600a II.  For those in the know, it’s a tube microphone that has a wonderfully warm, rich tone. To those not in the know, it looks very nice:

On the games front, we’ve just forged a creative alliance with game writers and script developers International Hobo, with whom we collaborated on both MSA and Air Conflicts Secret Wars last year. The aim is to offer game developers a one-stop service, going from an initial script idea to fully recorded dialogue. On our part, that takes in casting, recording and editing of voice material.

Oh and stepping away from voices for a second, we’ve just recorded our own substantial library of footstep effects, at a new facility that’s recently opened near York.  Snow, gravel, marble.. even crunchy leaves. Just don’t mention the wet tarmac. Check out our photo album for a couple of images.

In our next update: how Jerry spent a morning sword-fighting with himself in the voice booth.  No, really.

Well March has been a month for game launches.  First came Shogun 2 Total War, from Creative  Assembly.  The reviews have been very positive so far, with scores around the 9/10 mark! One review said, “the sound effects and music are nothing short of stellar.”

Then it was Motorstorm Apocalypse.  This was due for launch in early March but after the terrible events in Japan, with the earthquake, tsunami and ongoing nuclear crisis, Sony delayed the release of Evolution’s racing title. The game features an earthquake-stricken city as its backdrop and it was felt that holding the launch back until the 31^st (today, as I write this!) was the best thing to do.

The reviews and general buzz around this game have been tremendous. We’ve worked with Evolution since 2000 and have never known one of their titles to be so “talked about.” That’s not a reflection on any of their previous work, just an indicator of how popular MSA is going to be.  The game director, Matt Southern, and his team have worked hard for three long years on this title. Well done chaps (and chap-esses)!

So what are we working on now? Well, we’re busying creating sound effects for a game for the NGP – Next Generation Portable.  The PSP2 in short.  We can’t give too much away at the moment, although the game we’re working on was demonstrated at the big NGP launch in Japan a few months ago.  But it’s exciting to be working on a new bit of hardware again. Takes us back to Pursuit Force and the original PSP…

That’s it for now. We need some kind of “Mork calling Orson, come in Orson,” style sign off.  Suggestions welcome via email.

This is probably a good time to bring you up to date on what Media Mill have been doing over the twelve months or so.  There’ve been two distinct themes to our work since this time last year: cars and ninjas. Or to be more precise: vehicle recording and audio for animation.

We started 2010 with the task of recording cars for Driver San Francisco, being produced by Ubisoft Reflections in Newcastle. There are over one hundred different vehicles in the game and we recorded thirty six cars (and one big truck) in eight channels. They ranged from a 1972 Beetle, through numerous American muscle cars, to a Ferrari 599 and Lamborghini Guilardo.  We even managed to squeeze a Range Rover onto a DynaPack (the rolling road type system we used for this project), which is no mean feat.

We also provided audio assets for Milan based Milestone Games, who were producing the all-new WRC game for the PS3 and 360. When we heard about them making the game we got in touch and told them about our work on the original series, from 2000 to 2005.  They brought us on board to record numerous rally cars and then to provide extra samples, such as road surface noise and collision sounds.

Around the same time we we asked by Black Rock, down in Brighton, to provide more car audio for the Downloadable Content (extra stuff, to the uninitiated) for their racing game Split Second.  We’d worked on this in 2009 and were only too happy to record some more cars for the Disney owned studio.

Then we recorded a stack for vehicles for Evolution Studios’ Motorstorm Apocalypse.  These included some very fast bikes (one reached 200 mph on a rolling road) and some stunning drift cars (out on a track).  We also recorded a fabulous monster truck and the equally fabulous giant Scania that carries it to shows.

We’d have been justified in having a lie down after all that lot but instead we got stuck into working on Shogun 2 Total War.  For this, we mixed audio tracks – foley, sfx and voice – for 120 minutes of pre rendered animation that is used in the game during assassination tasks.  The animation is broken down into around 300 separate movies which are then stitched together in real time. Creativity and sound design aside, getting consistency across all those mixes has been a challenge and the result is something we’re really proud of.

And to finish: we’ve also mixed the 48 cutscenes for Motorstorm Apocalypse.  These have a very striking look to them and were a different sort out of challenge to the Shogun work.  We won’t say too much more as this hugely explosive racing game is out soon but we think you’ll be impressed!

An awful lot has been going on over recent months. We’ve been working on some cracking games, including Motorstorm Apocalypse and Shogun 2. We’ll bring you the lowdown in a later post but in the meantime, welcome to the new site!