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FX: Why is Boca Grande's Watson Wu recording Humvees?

Watson Wu is one of those people who doesn’t take a single noise for granted. He knows, through creating sound effects for video games and other forms of media, that every single noise in a staged environment has to be perfect to achieve the desired effect.

According to the definition of “sound,” it must have three elements to be complete – generation, transmission and sound. While most every day sounds are simply recognized and filed by the subconscious, it is Wu’s job as a sound effects recording artist to separate each one to its unique perfection, recreate it, then put them all back together.

“My niche these past few years has been field recordings, acquiring sounds that most people can’t get,” said the audio engineer with an office and studio in Boca Grande. The composer and sound designer who owns Watson Wu Studios has been steadily working his way toward bigger and bigger projects, and has worked with some of the top audio experts in Hollywood.

His most recent project, a sequel video game called “Operation Flashpoint-Dragon Rising,” scheduled for release in September of this year, found him recording sounds in a California desert at a military base called MCAGCC, at 29 Palms. Humvees, tanks, light armored and amphibious vehicles, you name it … Wu tracked down every sound each one made and recorded it.

“For a modern military video game the publisher Codemasters wanted real sounds from real vehicles and real weapons,” he said. “It took a year of calling and begging to get permission to get on the base. Retired generals, congressional people, everyone in the military, it seemed.”

His persistence paid off, and he and his crew took off to California for a week recently to get the job done. While it required a lot of sweat, some minor injuries and a lot of work, he said it was an experience of a lifetime. With a total of four men working on the project, they worked steadily around the clock. More than four or five hours of sleep a night was a luxury as they eventually recorded more than 100 gigabytes of sounds, from the opening and closing of a tank hatch to the noise projected by each vehicle as they passed someone walking on the road.

Wu, who spent a lot of time that week on top of an M1A1 Abrams tank, said they had to wear flak vests and combat helmets while recording in 110-degree heat. Taping the tiny microphones to the essential points on the vehicles could take up to two or three hours of time each day, and Wu said it also required them to eat a lot of diesel fumes.

“I couldn’t fit in the gunner’s position, we had our guy Nathan, who is 5 feet 9 inches, do that,” he said. “It takes a lot of people to operate a tank and we had to record the sound each one made, and what everything sounded like from each position.”

He said the rather shocking momentum and reverberation from a 120mm dummy round sounded very realistic from inside the tank, but the tank itself, known as the “Whispering Ghost,” was not loud at all.

“It’s a battle tank that some call a Cadillac,” Wu said. “That tank’s name was actually Mufasa. It can come up behind you on the road before you know it’s there. We were in this tank weighing more than 60 tons with a turbine jet engine powering it, and it goes 70 miles per hour, it was amazing. But they wouldn’t let us go that fast. We settled for 45 mph.”

Wu said they also recorded personal carrier trucks, also known as “seven-ton” trucks, at all of its different speeds to record each sound. Another vehicle, an armor-plated Humvee, was another challenge.

“We had a wish list from the company, World – wide AAA, and they needed fast braking sounds from that vehicle, which is a very specific sound,” he said. “I was on top, and I told them to grab my ankle if they were going to brake, and squeeze it hard for a really hard brake. At one point they grabbed both ankles and squeezed hard, I wasn’t sure what to do then.”

He continued.

“There’s definitely a degree of difficulty about the job, because these machines are big, dangerous and fast. We had to carefully situate the microphones so they weren’t destroyed or damaged by any of the moving pieces.”

Wu said the mics, while very small, range from $500 to $5,000 each but can take an audio “pounding” of up to 150 decibels.

“We use gaffer’s tape to secure them,” he explained. “You can stick it on a Ferrari or a Rolls Royce and it peels off with no damage, but you can drive the vehicle 250 miles per hour and it won’t come off … if you do it correctly. We went through a lot of rolls of tape, but didn’t break any mics.”

Wu continued, “It’s not just having surround sound that’s a challenge. In the game when you’re the driver, you have the voices all around you, it’s multi-channel, and all of the other three people who operate the tank, as well as your commander, could be yelling at you at one time. Or, as an infantry guy, you hear a tank going by you and we record what that sounds like.”

Wu said another interesting aspect of the project was working with Kevin Collins, a retired major who commanded the tank division at 29 Palms for years, and is now a military consultant for the entertainment industry.

“He knew what everything did, he knew everyone on base, he knew how a Marine would talk and how each vehicle would be operated in different situations,” he said. On our first day there we were told that two vehicles we had been promised were not available. He speed-dialed the colonel and we got the vehicles.”

Collins has worked with Steven Spielberg on movies such as “War of the Worlds,” and even has a cameo appearance.

Wu also worked with Aaron Marks, also a retired Marine, who was the recording supervisor for the project, a top sound man who worked on projects such as Midnight Club 2, and Dirt, two popular racing video games, and Tom Clancy’s EndWar.” While one of Marks’ books was part of Wu’s inspiration to become a sound engineer, Wu has been featured in a more current book penned by Marks. They are now business partners, and have worked on several projects together.

In the past Wu did some additional field recordings for two installments of a popular race car video game, “Need for Speed.” Moreover he just completed another sci-fi game where he utilized several vehicles owned by a man in Sarasota. One of them was a Porsche worth more than $1 million. Wu recorded every sound, from the revving of a supercharged engine in a 1969 Corvette to the opening of the gas tank latch on the Porsche.

“Some of these games take on average two years to create, with budgets that are $2 million and up, some are even $10 million,” he said. “And the return is huge. They’re harder to work on than movies, actually. Movies are linear, but we have to do things like capture variations of each sound, do things like adding or detracting RPM’s, with four to six good takes on every speed. You have to realize that each car sounds different, how a Porsche redlines at 9 1/2 before it gets red, or the different rattling and thicknesses of metals. It all makes a difference.”