The second piece of four 5 minute sound design pieces created for my final university professional practice portfolio. I received 1st Class Honours for my work across all four sound design pieces.

DMC3, originally released for the Playstation 2, is a videogame with exaggerated action, horror and comedic qualities. It balances its oppressive setting with main character Dante, an immortal badass whose inhuman capabilities and apathetic aloofness leads to many scenes that defy the atmosphere’s gravity.

I approached this piece under the pretence that, unlike BCS, grounded realism should exist only for the environment and objects within it, however, all actions performed by characters within and unto the setting should receive playfully extreme emphasis.

A display of this ethic would include the difference between objects like the ceiling fan retaining a natural hum (0:55) and the pool balls (3:18), which when launched, result in a bass drop, a low rising drone and slow, bassy whooshes as the balls fly by. The iconic sound of the balls clinking are also lightly reverberated for extra emphasis.

I opted mainly for rock music for this piece as I believed it fit with the grungy art direction of DMC3 and action oriented nature of the clip. The build up of Weed (Sweet, Sadic, Sick) by Hummingbird was used before the fight scene non-diegetically (1:56) but transforms its diegesis after Dante hits the jukebox (2:33). This shift was not featured in the original clip; I felt my version implied a stronger emotive and narrative cohesion.

Sassy, Naughty, Bitchy by Tata Young was used diegetically as a gag (2:25); the original clip involves no music when Dante uses the jukebox, however, I wanted to lean into the game’s comedic qualities by presenting a greater contrast to the phrase “Let’s rock!”

Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit (4:03) was featured as a build up to the clip’s end to continue the empowering, grungy aesthetic Dante portrays.

Throughout the piece, I utilised drones to accentuate the horror themes and to raise tension.

Some sounds were styled after Playstation 2’s era of sound design, such as crunchy wooden impacts (0:22), anime inspired stabbing impacts (1:48) and the bulkiness of Dante’s footsteps (0:14) to attain a greater cohesion with the game's visuals.