Michael Manning Email & Phone Number

Guildford, Gb

Sheffield, England, United Kingdom

My work establishing vision on a project while I was principal landed me the role of audio director which is the position I've been working in ever since. I found a natural ability to craft vision and direction through practical hands-on experimentation and collaboration. I spent a few years working on a AAA FPS project, where I defined the overall audio direction and operated as part of the leadership team. This pulled me into helping craft and define overall creative direction alongside the other creative discipline directors for art and design. This project has not been announced yet.Since mid-2023 I've been working on a new IP, working with many of the same audio team as from before except expanded to meet the more demanding content and delivery requirements of the title.

Sheffield, United Kingdom

I was made principal sound designer during the very early stages of an exciting and as yet still unannounced AAA multiplayer FPS. I can't say much about it, but it was my first opportunity to define an audio vision for an in-house project, I did this through close collaboration with the art director and the design team through lots of concept work. This really helped the whole team find the style and vibe for the project across disciplines.After our prototype was made and while the title sought funding, I helped out on a few other smaller projects across the studio, including the iOS game Spyder.

Sheffield, United Kingdom

I joined as a senior sound designer and was assigned to Hitman 2. This project was a co-dev with IO Interactive. We were asked to create 3 of the missions from that title. I really enjoyed working with IO, they embedded us into their team and we all worked closely together. Unfortunately when Square sold the studio in 2017, a lot of staff were laid off and the future of the project was in question. During this period, Sumo assigned me to work with a similar co-dev relationship with CCP games. I worked on Project Nova in collaboration with CCP audio director Alex Riviere where I designed weapon and ability sounds for the PvE shooter. Unfortunately the game was shelved during Open Beta, but I learned a lot along the way, the project had flaws but there were some cool sounds in there, considering how tiny the team was.

I worked with nDreams on 3-monthly contracts for three projects over two years. One was a VR installation experience called 'Perfect Balloon Flight' where I contributed the full soundtrack as well as sound assets. The other was an Oculus / Steam VR shooter called Shooty Fruity where I composed some of the music:https://youtu.be/p010gYPaY64?si=ZjT8RHwHxQ0MNnS3

Uk

Sound design, dialogue editing and dialogue recording for Sea of Thieves & Rare archive material marketing assets (dev diaries etc). Sound Designer supporting internal concept team (Everwild). Also did some minor UE markup for Sea of Thieves and a couple of design concepts / brainstorms.

I worked for some years as a media composer & sound designer across a variety of digital marketing campaigns. This lead to me picking up freelance work on indie game projects which helped me flesh out my reel enough to start working in-house game studio positions. From time to time I still take the odd job here and there if the project inspires me, or just to help out friends and previous clients.Notable game projects for me include Signal From Tolva where I came on to rework all their weapon audio which really boosted the experience. I also enjoyed working on Saturnalia where I used a lot of tape recording, looping and overdubbing to create an 80s horror atmosphere: https://youtu.be/5GaSd9swEBk?si=5YNOtMtW9f6t95lWI also spent a full year working on Rogue System, an ambitious game that was trying to become 'Falcon 4.0 in space" Essentially a very realistic space combat sim. It was cancelled after the main developer unfortunately suffered an injury, but we had a lot of fun making what we did which can still be played on Steam. We had a fully physical component-driven emitter system where many granular details of the spaceship combined to create an immersive ambience that changed as the ship became damaged or simply because of the stresses of moving through space. This was probably my most technical role and I learned a lot doing it.Clients & Brands:RCKR/Y&RBlueHiveBig RobotFordVirgin MediaLloyds TSBSanta RagionePuppy GamesDCIWeapon 7

Cambridge, United Kingdom

This was my first in-house position where I spent my first two years mostly composing. I managed to exploit the ancient technology they used to make Runescape to compose and integrate the first fully sampled music into the game. This elevated the soundtrack from essentially General MIDI sounding pieces into more cinematic / orchestral sounding pieces. Working alongside the audio director and our audio programmer, we then integrated a fully streaming, high-quality music playback system where I helped design a better music distribution system across the open-world. This all significantly updated and modernised the presentation of the ageing game. While the project itself wasn't super exciting for me, this modernisation work was engaging, and it allowed me to explore new musical territory.After this I moved on to some other projects which lead me to briefly working with Squarepusher on Stellar Dawn which was later cancelled. When this project failed I moved on to help the Transformers Universe team, I was mostly involved with sound design for some in-game weapons and marketing materials. I also was tasked with 'remixing' the orchestral soundtrack recorded by James Hannigan to give it more of an electronic edge. I had fun manipulating and expanding many orchestral stems recorded at Abbey Roads.My final project at Jagex was an online FPS called Block N' Load where I again did weapon sounds and also composed a lot of the music. After I left the studio, some of my music was later re-used in their Runescape themed card game called Chronicle.Projects:Block N' LoadTransformers Universe (cancelled)Stellar Dawn (cancelled)Runescape (Soundtrack)Chronicle (Soundtrack)

Ba Hons, Digital Audio And Sound Art, 2:1

Bachelor Of Technology - Btech, A Level Music Technology; S Level Music Technology