Double Fine Psychodyssey / psychonauts 2 (2020-2023)

Double Fine PsychOddysey is a docuseries with a funny name. It’s a series about making video games, but it’s mostly about the human side of game development. It tugs at the heartstrings, tracking the epic highs and dire lows in a rarely observed work environment. To me, it’s kind of like my favorite show, The Office… except real, and in a game development studio instead of a paper sales office.

After Microsoft acquired Double Fine Productions in 2019 — along with 2 Player Productions — I wondered what the fate of the film crew would be. Luckily, things stayed their current course, allowing us to complete our biggest production to date. The critically acclaimed, 32-part documentary that followed the complete development of Double Fine’s Game-of-the-Year-Nominated title, Psychonauts 2. The docuseries was finished in 2023 after 7 years of work, by 6 core members drawing from over 6,000 hours of raw captured footage. Once post production ended on our previous project finished in 2021, post production immediately started on our swan song, Double Fine PsychOdyssey, a follow up to the series’ predecessor, Double Fine Adventure.

As Lead Audio engineer for this project, I got a lot done over the course of the several years of post production, in addition to numerous on-location shoots in Double Fine’s office. Once complete, I mixed and mastered nearly 23 hours of audio over the course of 3 years in my at-home post production mixing studio.

“The best documentary I’ve ever seen about the creative process.”

— Ben Hanson, MinnMax

One of my favorite things about working with 2 Player Productions is them allowing me the ability to use audio as a creative tool to enhance and shape what is happening on screen. Whether ramping up music to add intensity, or strategically muting it to take the drama away from the situation, subtle sound design tricks are used often throughout the series, a few favorite examples highlighted below.

A recurring issue over the course of working with Double Fine is the constantly noisy production studio. Whether it’s giant heating ducts causing white noise in the background, excessively loud San Francisco traffic just outside the window, or just plain loud coworkers, it’s all part of a sound guy’s worst nightmare. Throughout production on documentaries previously recorded at Double Fine’s offices, I’ve been collecting room noise samples that have been fed into various audio repair tools, including Izotope RX. This tool allowed me to surgically remove unwanted noise, distorted audio from loud talkers, and a bunch of other things that might distract the viewer from the story being told on screen.

Additional mixing and audio post production for the series’ trailer, and other promotional collaborations surrounding Psychonauts 2’s marketing included commentary from YouTuber James Willems, and crowdfunding video updates for backers on FIG — A crowdfunding campaign that raised nearly $4 million from 20,000 members of its dedicated fanbase.

This project came with a lot of hardship while in the production and post production phases. A lot of them came from the fact that the world was in the middle of a pandemic, and the other came from the sheer size of the project that needed to be shared with team members being scattered internationally. This resulted in almost 100 terabytes of data being transferred across the globe, containing both high quality audio and video being shared with editors on the other side of the world.

Proprietary workflows were created over the course of the remote working era of the project, transferring massive collections of raw video footage, and complex session files between Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X. By designing and utilizing detailed tracking documents, a standard was developed over the course of years, spawning from my working relationship with producer Paul Levering and director Paul Owens (director of both 2 Player Productions and of 2023’s indie horror film, LandLocked).

In addition to the insane amount of audio work I did on this project (over 20 hours!), I also got to contribute my rounded creative input towards editing, music direction, art direction, and graphic design. While working in close collaboration with the series’ illustrator, Michael Firman, I developed the logo based on the team’s collaborative vision, later stylized by Michael to fit within his illustrated aesthetic for the series. Dozens of draft logos were created, ultimately landing on an iconic O-shaped eye, reminiscent of the main character’s abilities in Psychonauts 2. To further unify the docuseries with the game it was documenting, I co-developed the series’ lower third graphics alongside series producer, Paul Levering, incorporating the custom fonts developed for the game. Many visual elements were used across the series, and some didn’t make the cut… a decision made for the sake of doing whatever was best for the project.