Mike Hillard
Tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Crowbar Collective.
I’m Mike Hillard, My handle is CornetTheory because I’ve been a trumpet player for most of my life. In terms of games and mods, I’ve been a level designer, musician, and digital artist since 2004. I am currently composing or covering chip/game adjacent music over here: https://soundcloud.com/michael-hillard
I started down the path of voice acting because my Unreal Tournament 2004 level design friends needed voice samples for a mod. This directly led me to getting the role in Penumbra: Overture, and getting hired at a local radio station. Since then I’ve acted in at least 8 commercial indie games, and many many mod projects.
For Crowbar Collective I am primarily an actor, but over the years I have made tiny contributions in other areas, such as customizing vrad, programming the tau cannon’s wallshot particle effect, making small tweaks to the lighting on some earthbound maps, and manually editing the 2015 Multiplayer trailer on real VCRs.
How did you get involved with Black Mesa
By 2006 my local friends and I were obsessed with HLDM and making silly custom maps and player models. The Black Mesa team put out a general casting call for voice actors, so I decided to give it a shot.
At this time, I did not start out sounding similar to Hal Robbins, but I’m told they were not looking for a dead-on impression because they wanted several kinds of scientists. Eventually, after I was given the first script for the general chatter, I recorded the whole thing in one night out of excitement, and I started figuring out how to get the voice very close. I think it took about a year or two of practice before the similarity got to the point of fooling people with A/B comparisons; Just in time for the 2008 trailer.
What was the most challenging hurdle that was overcome during development in your role?
As soon as I joined the team, I moved away to college. So I had two options after that: Drive 6 hours one way to my house on weekends to use my own studio to record, or find out how to treat whatever dorm room I was in. I found that a lot of walls are too smooth to stick on foam, or too hard to hang up hooks for blankets.
Kevin and I did a lot of skype calls, testing solutions. Some of which are pretty funny, but effective. For example, Buying a golf umbrella big enough to fit my mic and computer monitors, and covering the entire thing with a comforter. Eventually I built a 7ft^3 room within a room, and treated it with deadening moving blankets.
When it came to driving home, I would have to disassemble my PC and lug it back and forth.
After a few years I had assembled two sets of PCs and equipment, one for home and one for college. This also helped out when we started needing the female scientist lines, It made scheduling my mother [Lurana Hillard] easier, and we could act scenes together.
The challenge wasn’t only to get a good environment, but also to make my space and mic placements, etc. match Kevin’s setup. We were pretty strict about the sessions and I would always send test lines to compare before starting.
I recorded all of the Scientist’s general chatter at least 3 times over the years. As more scripted scenes were created and added to the game, we needed to make it match how my voice and recording environment had changed.
What software did you use for your work?
Adobe Audition. When I worked in radio I had learned how to edit audio to make commercials. Back then it was Cool Edit Pro.
What kind of microphones & preamps were used to record your vocals?
Starting in 2007 through 2012, Kevin and I maintained using the “MXL 990” condenser and “M-Audio Delta 1010-LT” for consistency. Windows updates and driver support ended the Delta card, plus it was a PCI only board. After that, I began using the “Shure Super 55” and the “Scarlett 6i6” also, shoutouts to the Cloudlifter for dynamic mics.
When did your interest in game development begin?
It began at a very young age, wondering how cartridges worked. But a real turning point was my older brother playing with WADED.EXE for doom. It was mind-blowing that you could make your own levels. I was hooked from then on. From Duke3d to Half-Life, and then to UT2004 where the majority of my released deathmatch maps are.
Any favorite mods for Half-Life games?
Half-Quake is one of the most unique mods out there, and it really shows off what Goldsrc can do. Sven co-op, for consistently adding crazy features to the engine itself. Earth’s Special Forces (The Dragon Ball Z mod) was fun to fly around in. SMOD for HL2 because of the shovel and bullet time.
But, Rocket Crowbar will always be the gold standard.
Anything you would want to add to Black Mesa?
I wish we could pack-in the awesome Hazard Course remake mod by PSR Digital for Black Mesa.
Do you accept pineapple on pizza or are you against it?
Everyone is allowed to have their own preferences, but folks should just let people enjoy things. Personally I think pineapple on pizza is tasty.
#TEAM RED SHIRT