The sound (by Pierre-Marie Blind)
Let’s set the scene:
Scratch, scratch, scratch. The wolf cub's furry head just emerged from the snow.
Huff, pant.
Panting heavily, it tries to catch its breath and then lets out a faint whimper.
The cold is biting, you can even hear the frost crackling on the nearest tree branch. The wind gently whistles through nearby trees.
A gust of fine-powdered snow has brushed away the trail of the wolf’s family.
Awroooooooo.
The cub howls and the only response is the distant echo of its own voice.
It is all so quiet, yet the silence is deafening as we introduce players to the world of Blanc.
In-game screenshot, the wolf cub introduction cutscene.
So Much Snow!
Hello! My name is Pierre-Marie Blind, the Audio Designer and Foley Artist on Blanc. I remember that I was onboarded onto the project in late January 2021 - it was winter in Holland, and much to my luck it was -12 °C (32°F) and snowing heavily outside my window. I was able to get started right away.
I spent my first week on the project outside gathering sounds: rolling snowballs, lifting up frozen tree trunks, shaking heavy branches, pounding on the snow, walking on frozen lakes… and falling through one of them with my microphones.
Field recording sessions for Blanc in January 2021, Venlo, The Netherlands.
Yet at this point, all I knew about the game was that the cast would be all animals. A wolf cub, a fawn, some ducks, and… plenty of snow! Just lots of it! These field recording sessions proved to be essential later and allowed all the careful articulation that was needed to bring these characters to life. Indeed the needs for Blanc's soundscape were truly one of a kind.
The Game that was Only Wind
The sound design of Blanc composes with the silence of nature during a long winter. Its reduced orchestra plays only a few instruments: the presence and movements of the animals on screen, their whines, howls, and cries of joy (hear the many celebrations in Chapter 10!). The second main instrument is the epic wilderness itself, the wind. Sometimes protective (the quiet hush of the forest in Chapter 2), sometimes lonely (the deserted village in Chapter 3, standing for a bit near those TV antennas), sometimes dangerous (have you crossed that bridge in Chapter 8?), or occasionally absent (like in Chapter 9’s eerie all-white landscape). Louis' music left plenty of room for an intricate dialogue between the arrangement of his interactive tunes and the melody of the wind.
We spent a lot of time fine-tuning how we could contribute to each other’s propositions at any moment of Blanc'sadventure. Chapter 8 contains a good example: An incipient storm is coming, and our duo is now accompanied by a couple of goats as they start crossing a bridge. As they progress, the wind roars and whistles while the bridge’s metal structure screeches and whines. The music reduces itself to a reduced ostinato of violins. The danger of the environment dominates all of your senses.
A bit later, as the wolf cub and the fawn now head down alone in the snowstorm, the environment evaporates. Visibility is reduced to a few meters. Sound-wise, suddenly you can only hear the snow and wind violently whipping our duo while the music takes over the dramatic tension with dozens of instruments, high and lows, and leads the way until the scene’s ending.
“Clip-Clop”, Bringing the Characters to Life
Most of the Foley* of our two companions were done by hammering fresh snow and icy lakes with gloves and other props. As you may have noticed the wolf cub has a very different attitude compared to the fawn. He is short, easily out of breath, growls as he tries to climb the higher spots, and walks (or should I say pushes!) around the snow, a bit like a snowplow.
Make sure to pause for a bit on the frozen lake in Chapter 4. You’ll start to hear the ice crackling below their feet, and who knows, they might fall through like me and my microphones!
The prop that was used for the sniffing nose of the fawn.
The pair of gloves that were used for most of the wolf cub movements across various surfaces.
For the fawn steps on the wood beams, I used cooked coconut meat and ground coffee sprinkled over a few wood planks.
The Foley for the goslings and the mother goose is a classic trick: plastic gloves and a feather duster. Their voice was made with a flute’s beak. If the goslings didn't drive you nuts by the end of Chapter 5, make sure to lean in an attentive ear once they have reached safety and you will hear them taking the cutest nap in unison!
The vocalization palette for the fawn turned out to be the most difficult design of the game. In the real world, fawns are very quiet animals, they only make a few noises, with one of the most common being a not-so-attractive “bleat.” In the final game, after many unsuccessful iterations, the fawn ended up using a mix of a few real fawn vocalizations, adult does, along with vocalizations of coyotes, human babies, baby goats, and even baby camels!
On Natural Sounds and Comical Sounds
On the technical side, Blanc’s sound design uses minimal technology and systems for real-time gameplay. We focused most of the effort on the content. Blanc being a linear experience, the most important was to get the atmosphere, the pacing, the dramatic tension, and the inherent degree of repetitiveness right.
An interesting thing about repetitiveness is that some sound effects have a lot of variations and high granularity, like footsteps sounds. Others have purposefully no variations. Beyond technical considerations (like memory budget which is not really a problem on today’s platforms), the choice of having none, a bit, or many variations was conditioned by the relation the player would have to these sounds in their context. The wolf cub’s footsteps, for example, are made up of three groups: walking, trotting, and running, each broken into 2 to 3 subgroups (depending if the step is a strong support step or a light step in their animation cycle). Each of these subgroups contains up to 15 variations - he is a four-legged animal after all! Because these footsteps are triggered so often and have to feel the most natural, it was important to give them a high number of variations.
On the opposite end, a puzzle like the large tree trunk balance in Chapter 4 only has a single sound for each direction it pivots. For this, the intention was to make the riddle more amusing, so purposefully I made it feel more artificial to the ear (no natural sound repeats exactly the same in the real world), making it a bit funny and easily memorized. As our two characters balance up and down again and again until they find the solution, the sound design sets an audible running gag for each of the players’ missteps. Making sound variations is relatively cheap with today’s technology, yet the use and quantity of variations need to be carefully considered as they can make or break a subtle comical opportunity.
In-game screenshot, the tree trunk riddle in Chapter 4.
From the quietest to the most intense sequences, we hope you enjoyed the sound experience we crafted for Blanc as much as we enjoyed making it!
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*Foley is the art of performing custom sounds to a picture, a game, a radio, or theatre screenplay generally with the help of various props. Things like character movements are often best recorded fresh for every project to match best their attitude, weight, and other unique traits.