For the collaboration unit, we where paired with the MA Game Design students to create the full sound design of their end of year project. The Phonebox – is the the title of their VR video game, a game that explores difficult mental health situations through a narrative in VR, aiming to exemplify these hard experiences and try to come up with new solutions and perspectives to mental health issues. In a way this game attempts to de-taboo mental health, bringing the topic to the clear and finding solutions.

The complete team consisted of MA Video Game students: Abhimanyu Chattopadhyay, Yantao Tang, Filip Norkowski and James Graithen. In the sound team: Daniel Pakdel, Hywel Pryer and me. When we met for the first time with the MA students we found out that they had already a clear idea of what sounds they needed, they even had already music for the game, limiting our tasks to diegetic sound and atmospheres. This was somewhat discouraging, it seemed that we where working for them instead than working in a collaboration. Even though of this we proceeded to outline a work plan and a spreadsheet to record and arrange the sounds they needed. As the video game is situated in a phone box, we decided to carefully choose and design the sounds to fit this space, for example we did field recording inside boxes around London to make it as real as possible. We compiled a complete library of the sounds they needed and handed it over for their deadline. As we didn’t had much creative opportunity in this part of the work, us the sound group decided to change as much as possible for our hand in, including our own music and our new more ‘experimental’ sounds. We divided the work in the following way, Hywel was in charge of recording dialogue and UI sounds, Daniel was going to do foley and atmospheres, and me the music and non-diegetic sounds.