Idea: To create a new background score for a series of scenes in the game Portal 2.

For this, I needed gameplay footage. Thankfully, since I have a copy of the game myself, I was able to record my own gameplay. This would be an advantage, as, since I would be controlling the player character, I could have them react to various scenes (although there’s only so much you can do with walking in any given direction and frantically moving the mouse around to make it look like the character is silently panicking).

Another major advantage to this is that I could mute the music in-game so that, in theory, I could just have the voice clips play, so that any music I compose could be mixed around it, rather than on top of it, making it sound more natural. However, I was unable to turn off the sound effects (including background noise), so that I have had to resort to taking all the voice clips of the characters in the game, and then put them in manually. I had to do this anyway, since there were a couple frame-skips while I was recording, causing the audio to skip too (THANKS FRAPS).

If anything, it’s made me see just how many lines of dialogue there can be in a video game. As of writing, I’m about 25% through getting the necessary voice clips, and I’d estimate there are about 100 voice clips in this 28-minute sequence alone. The game itself is about 7-10 hours, and there are several lines that the game’s characters will say even if you leave the game idle.

So that’s happening.