We are joined by Barry Donelly, Kristen Quinn, Benoît Marsalone and Arnaud Noble to talk about recording and designing sounds for underwater scenes in films and games. We discuss our favourite underwater recording sessions, what works and doesn’t work with hydrophones and when it is best to fake it with water sounds recorded with normal microphones.
Barry Donelly is based in Cape Town, South Africa and has over 120 IMDB credits to his name including working on films like “The Departed, Blood Diamond, Invictus, District 9 and recently Netflix’s “My Octopus Teacher” which won an Oscar for best documentary feature.
Kristen Quinn is an Audio Director at Polyarc games, currently working on Moss, Book 2. She has been in the games industry for close to 16 years. She’s worked on games like F.E.A.R, Fable 2&3, Legends of Runeterra, and Sunset Overdrive.
Benoît Marsalone : Has been a sound designer for 10 years, he spent his first 5 years in linear post production in Paris, mainly for animated tv shows and since 2016 has been in game audio. Benoît currently is working as sound designer at Wild Sheep Studio in Montpellier, on a game called Wild. He also cofounded Spectravelers with Arnaud to record and edit sound libraries for professionals, including the amazing underwater library Submersion.
Arnaud Noble has worked for 10 years in the video game industry as a sound designer and recently started a new position at Dontnod in Montréal, as Lead sound designer. Working with Benoît their recent sound library project, is called Quantum and is based on EMF recordings
Super huge double amazing thanks to Linas Maknys for editing and mixing this episode. Linas is a sound designer based in Vilnius, Lithuania. Thanks so much Linas, you are a life saver!