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GETTING TO KNOW: FINISHING MOVE INC Finishing Move Inc. are without doubt one of the most in-demand sound design/composition teams going at the moment. The LA based duo, made up of Brian White and Brian Trifon, have over time accumulated the kind of credit list that most can only dream of, having worked on some of the biggest titles in the gaming and film world. We recently caught up with Brian and Brian, to talk Halo, Hollywood and the hardware that got them there. Finishing Move are doing big things in the Film and Gaming space. Did you guys know each other prior to entering the industry? What is it about working together that makes it such a potent pairing? We were good friends before we started Finishing Move and had collaborated together on various projects at a commercial music house we both worked for in the late ‘00s. We noticed that we had very complementary skill sets, and whenever we’d collaborate on something, it would just turn out a lot better, so we decided to team up and form Finishing Move. Working as a team really suits our workflow, as it allows us to deep dive and try out new ideas or concepts that would otherwise take too much time away from getting work finished. A lot of times, one of us might be doing R&D on some new sound or technique while the other is writing, and we can trade off as needed. It can be hard to push the sonic envelope if you are always just trying to push stuff out the door and meet a deadline, so we both really enjoy the flexibility and support the team dynamic offers. From your perspective, was there a particular breakthrough moment for Finishing Move or was it more a case of chipping away for years and slowly building momentum?
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We still think we are slowly chipping away! Halo 2 Anniversary was a big break for us, as it was the first massive project Finishing Move took on as a proper company, and we had just come off a cancelled project the year prior and really needed a win. We score supervised and produced that whole soundtrack, in addition to lending our composing and sound design skills, which was a huge responsibility and really set the tone for Finishing Move as a “triple-A” team in game audio. From the high-octane synthiness of Crackdown 3 to the lush, orchestral driven work on Halo Wars 2, Finishing Move are well-known in the gaming world for their dense, narrative driven style of composition. Is there a particular type of project or sonic palette that you prefer to work with? We love to push the envelope of musical sound design and create stuff no one has ever heard before. For example, we developed our instrument Posthuman during work on Halo Wars 2 as a bridge between otherworldly synthetic sounds and the organic sounds from the live orchestra, because we didn’t feel like anything off the shelf was doing what we wanted. Our dream project is any project that allows us to blur the notion of what makes a sound feel synthetic or organic, and how unique timbres can support or convey the emotion of the project or scene in addition to the melodic and harmonic content of a cue. As well as all the gaming stuff, you guys are equally at home working in the film medium - Uncut Gems, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Mad Max: Fury Road, just to name a few. How does designing audio for film differ to designing for the game-sphere? Does it require a different approach or do the same principles still mostly apply? A lot of our sound design work focuses heavily on theatrical trailer content, which is even more specific than just sound design for film or sound design for games. Trailers
have to convey the emotional impact of a two hour film in under two minutes, so the way they use sound and music is often very different than how it gets used in the actual film, TV show, or game it represents. The core tools and workflow of sound design remain the same; source/field recording, DAW processing techniques, etc. so it’s more about changing your mindset of where it is going to be used and how it needs to function in that context. For example, a gunshot or weapon in a film may be intentionally very realistic or only slightly sweetened for impact. In contrast, a gunshot designed for use in a trailer is purposely built to sound 100X larger than life, with a huge impact layered in and a super long reverb tail, because that one sound has to convey a whole film’s worth of energy and emotion in a very short window of time. I know you have a particular penchant for SSL Fusion stereo outboard processing. How did you come across this unit and what is it that makes it such an integral part of your signal chain? I think we read about the Fusion on Gearslutz initially. It took a few months to actually get the unit we ordered because it was brand new, and supply was short. The drive portion is worth the price of admission alone, and the rest of the box is just the gravy on top. Something about that drive circuit and how it inflates the signal really compliments the rest of the hardware chain we have cooked up. For example, when you’re doing really dynamic or cinematic stuff, it can be hard to get a lift out of the softer sections without killing the delicate envelope of your mix. A lot of times, a compressor even with half a dB of gain reduction just sounds wrong in this scenario, that’s where the Fusion’s drive circuit really shines. It has this way of lifting and adding density to the signal while retaining all the dynamics that just seems to work for our material. In our current signal chain, the mix goes into the SSL Fusion which has an SSL-style VCA compressor patched directly
into the insert. There is no patch bay, it’s all hard-wired in the same order for every mix, and everything generally stays set up in just one or two configurations to make recall easier. That way, we can gain stage into the chain from the DAW, and it just works its magic with very little fuss. With so much work on, do you still find time to experiment with new techniques when working or is your process fairly set at this point? Have you experimented with anything new on any recent that you wouldn’t have thought would work in the past? Yes! Experimentation is a huge part of our process. As we mentioned earlier, being a team allows us to build in time for that during any project. We even make a point to use any downtime to explore new creative techniques that we think up, even if it’s just checking out what new sample libraries or plug-ins came out recently. Most of our best production techniques are born out of experimentation with little expectation of how it might turn out. Plenty of these experiments end in failure, where you think you have an idea about how to approach something, and it just doesn’t work well in practice. But sometimes you surprise yourself with how well something works, and it’s usually things that are quite simple that yield the coolest results. Lastly, what’s next for Finishing Move? Any exciting new projects you can tell us about? Lots of stuff we can’t really share at the moment, unfortunately. The game gods tend to only let us talk about things after they ship or very close to the launch date. But we promise, we have some very cool stuff coming out in the first half of 2020 and you can follow our socials to stay up to date on what we are working on. Head to our website to read this feature in full, and check out Finishing Move Inc.’s website to find out more about their projects today.
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