Modern Warfare III – Campaign Premiere

Growing up, the original Call of Duty was one of the first games I ever played, and the series stuck with me all the way up to Black Ops. Even now, these games manage to bring the cinematic action from movies into the gaming world, and the vivid set pieces they create still fascinate me. When they premiered the Modern Warfare 3 campaign at Gamescom 2023, I was really captivated by the opening minute in an underwater submarine environment, and I just knew I had to design sound for it.

My sound design process

• Because Soundly is such a convenient tool for sound design, most of the raw samples in this trailer come from their sample library which I’ve then used to design unique effects. As an example, the submarine interior ambience consists of multiple layers such as engine room tone, creaky metal, and three different layers of water mixed together to combine the best frequency spectrums of each.
• In the intro, I wanted the submarine to feel like an aggressive beast honing in on the viewer. I also wanted the viewer to really feel the power of the submarine as it sails past – like the ocean is being flushed away in front of it. As it nears the viewer, the engine sounds become quite prominent to give this feeling of the ship being on a mission and hunting something.
• With the keywords “cinematic” and “action” in mind, I wanted every action in the video to feel impactful with deep subs on most individual sound effects, and a lot of low frequencies. The lever handling at 0:27 in particular is something I wanted to feel very powerful.
• I also wanted the different environments to feel have acoustic contrast. When the soldiers are standing inside the submarine in the beginning, the room has a rather airy feeling, and inversely I wanted the viewer to feel completely encapsulated by water when they dive under at 0:30.

My music production process

• The purpose of the music in this video is to add a suspenseful rhythm, like time is counting down as the soldiers are preparing for action. To create this feeling, I added a muted guitaret playing a constant triplet rhythm. Like it’s constantly moving, but without really going anywhere.
• To really accentuate this feeling of time ticking down, I also added a percussive element halfway through that ticks in the right ear – almost like a more complex clock. Occasionally, this percussion is “unleashed” with added distortion to indicate that action is building up.
• In the beginning, as the submarine is sailing around, there’s a sonar beep playing in time with the music. Initially I had added this as a separate sound effect, but I had this feeling that it was clashing too much with the music. To fix this issue, I ended up reproducing the sonar beep with a plucky instrument in Omnisphere, and incorporating it into the music instead.

My editing and mixing process

• While designing the sound and producing the music, I began structuring my Pro Tools session, placing time markers and laying down the different layers of ambience for each environment.
• Worldizing is a big aspect of this video, since it stretches over two acoustically different environments – the submarine interior, and the underwater exterior. For this, I set up two different reverb buses with different room sizes, EQs, decay, and pre-delay. I then routed each sound effect through one bus according to the environment, and adjusted the wet level for each sound depending on how close it was to the camera.
• To follow the positions of characters moving on screen, I’ve used automation capture to change the panning of each sound in real-time while tracking the video.
• I find that cinematic action movies have a tendency to be very loud, and I wanted to replace this in the mix with something akin to a brickwall limiting method. It’s almost one long wall of sound all the way through, which I think suits the thick underwater atmosphere.

Behind the scenes of the project