Matthew Reed
Audio Engineer
BA in art & Design from UCSC
I am a recent graduate with a love for creating games that tactfully combine powerful storytelling and impactful sound design. The visuals of a game are only as powerful as the sound design backing them. Making such visions a reality is a dream of mine that I plan to continue achieving each time I finish a project.
This demo shows a few highlights of my abilities as an audio engineer. It includes my sound design from Seamless, and the "making curry" overdub. One of my favorite compositions can also be found here, along with a small overview on some Wwise implementation I did for a personal project.
BUsy? check out my demo reel!
Games
During the 2020 Game Maker's Toolkit game jam I joined several talented game designers I knew from the Robits project, who now work at Playstation, Blizzard, Warner Brothers & Disruptive Games to learn from and create a game in under 48 hours. This year's theme, "out of control!" which lead us to make this silly physics based game. In those 48 hours I made all the music and sound effects, then implemented them into Unreal.
As the audio engineer for the Tactikids team I have been tasked with the creation of music and foley, as well as remastering of existing sounds. For this process I will be using Ableton Live. I am also implementing the audio into Unity using the Wwise middleware in order to make dynamic, interactive sounds that will give the players the immersion we seek in our grandiose kid punk theme.
Tactikids | Summer 2020 - Current | Sound Design & Implementation
The sound design for Kidgilantes was a collaborative effort between myself and Mason Taylor. My contribution to the team came in the form of sound effects cohesive to the stylized world, and direction on how Mason could use dynamic composition to improve the music of Kidgilantes. Additionally I had been playtesting each build to give the team in-depth feedback on our systems, and overall design.
Seamless | Winter 2019 - Spring 2020 | Sound Design & QA
The sound effects of Seamless were designed to aid the feeling of fast-paced, samurai style combat. The dynamic compositions of Seamless were made in collaboration with professional shamisen player Kyle Abbott to achieve the same tone. This collaboration with Kyle was my first delve into studio style recording and it was an amazing learning experience.
My work for Last Lullaby was stretched thin between three different tasks, most of my time being spent on the implementation side. With a team of only three, and a time budget of less than three months this game left a lot of for me to desire, the process of making this game taught me a great deal about prioritization on a short time budget.
Last Lullaby | Spring 2019 | Sound Design, Level Design, & Implementation
Robits | Fall 2018 | Sound Design
My contribution to Robits was as a sound designer, I composed pieces and created sound effects that gave perspective to their later sound designer as to what the sound of Robits would be. This was my first project with a real DAW and lead to my passion in learning all I could about audio engineering.
Compositions
The following are a collection of pieces that I worked on out of a desire to learn composition and find a sound that I could identify with.
Independent work | Summer 2017 - present
Sound Design
SpiderMan Animation| Spring 2020 | Foley & Implementation
This was a quick project I did in collaboration with Pace Mendoza. He animated this piece and asked me to put some sounds together for his scene. All but the New York traffic sounds were created from scratch.
Pokemon Curry Overdub| Winter 2019 | Foley & Synthesis
For the final project in my audio class. I chose this Pokemon fan animation, muted all the audio, and re-created it all from scratch, aside from the guitar work a friend of mine contributed. It was an incredibly fun process which took about 25 hours.
