Opening 4

This opening was a bit different than the past two. I really liked this, though. I had the opportunity to play an interesting game while listening to one of the best albums of all time. One of the greats of the movie industry spoke in one of the videos watched. In another video, I saw just how much preparation there can be in making a music video. Also, I could watched a video about the sound design of one of my favorite games of all time. This was truly some intriguing material.

To start, I played Machinarium while listening to Nirvana's Nevermind. Why did I choose Nevermind? Of the top 50 albums of all time, Nevermind was the closest to my preferred genre. I also already knew and liked a few songs from the album beforehand, though I had never listened to it in full previously. Anyway, the album was excellent company to playing Machinarium. It is a puzzle game, and it was moderately challenging. I really had to wrack my brain to figure out the last part of the demo. It was a rather short demo, as I ended up still having most of Nevermind to listen to once I finished Machinarium.

Later on, I watched the Walter Murch video on Hollywood sound design. Though I am not planning to go into anything specifically audio-related, what Murch had to say really left an impact on me. Breaking down the audio tracks in the scene from Apocolypse Now immensely opened my eyes to how complex sound can be in movies. When everything is put together in a perfect fashion, one will become involved with a film. With something that is near perfect, the audience may be great appreciators of a film, but not necessarily participants.

Another video I watched was the TED Talks on "How to Engineer a Viral Music Video". Hearing what Sadowsky had to say about making the video for "This Too Shall Pass" almost blew my mind. The people making this video spent weeks upon weeks trying to perfect this crazy Rube Goldberg machine that worked in sync with the music. I have never really thought of music videos as taking that long to make. A lot of music videos, though, do not take that long to produce, since not every music video involves some insane contraption. Regardless, I cannot even imagine what the preparation and shooting of that video was like.

I watched a few other videos that did not really have much of an impact on me, but finally I arrived at "Sound Design and Music of a Video Game: Halo: Reach". I have spent countless hours of my life playing Halo: Reach and I am always willing to see a little bit more behind the scenes stuff. Probably the most interesting thing that was said about the sound design was that they had to make the sounds "sound like Halo." This made total sense to me. Sure, not every game in the Halo franchise has the same sound effects for guns, grenades, and such, but I will admit that they all have a certain similar "feel" to them. That is probably a lot of the reason the Halo series remains so strong today.

Overall, this was a much different experience for an opening than I am used to.  So much of what I had the opportunity to do interested me deeply. Never have I thought that I would be watching a video about one of my favorite ever video games for educational purposes. I guess this just shows that I am on the right track.