Positioning my work in reality/marketing

Positioning my work in a wider public

After thinking through my practice, from exhibition work to game audio and film, I feel like I’m starting to understand a bit more about where my work might sit in a wider context.

At the beginning of the course, I think I was more focused on sound as an artistic medium on its own. A lot of the work was personal, and more about expressing ideas or emotions. But through different projects, especially Sound for Screen, my internship at Virtuos, and the Gallery 46 exhibition, my perspective has changed quite a lot.

Now I feel my work is more connected to multimedia and storytelling, rather than purely sound art. I’m more interested in how sound works together with image, interaction, and narrative, instead of existing alone. Because of that, I think my work doesn’t really belong only in an exhibition space anymore.

In terms of audience, I don’t think I want to make work only for a small group of people who already understand experimental art. I feel more interested in reaching a wider audience, people who might experience the work through games, films, or online platforms. Like I mentioned in previous blogs, the Ubisoft, the BFI London Film Festival and others.

For the future, I think my work will be positioned more in areas like game audio, film sound design, or other digital content production. These spaces allow storytelling to happen in a more accessible way, while still keeping some creative freedom.

I’m still trying to find the balance between creative practice and industry work, comparing the beginning of the course, I feel I have a clearer idea of what kind of work I want to do, and who I want it to reach.

Producer and Audience the film festival

From my exhibition at Gallery 46, I noticed that the audience was quite specific. Most of them were students or people already interested in art. They came, experienced the work, and had their own interpretations. I think this is interesting, but at the same time, it feels a bit limited.

When I look at something like the BFI London Film Festival, the audience is much wider. It’s not only artists, but also general public, industry people, and media. The work shown there still has artistic value, but it also needs to connect with more people.

For example, directors like Christopher Nolan, his films are conceptual, but still reach a large audience. His works aren’t simple, but they still communicate clearly enough for people to engage with them. I think this is quite interesting, it shows that work can be both creative and accessible at the same time.

This also makes me think about my own work. If I want my practice to move beyond the BA Sound Arts context, I need to think more about where and how it can be experienced by a wider audience. One possible way is through film or film festival contexts, where sound design becomes part of a complete work that people come to watch and experience.

For instance, if I work as a sound designer on a film and it is shown in festivals like the BFI London Film Festival, the audience is getting wider automatically. It will become a mix of public viewers.

For me, this is something I want to explore more. I feel more interested in creating work that can exist in these kinds of contexts, where it reaches a wider public and becomes part of a shared experience.

I’m still figuring this out, but I think thinking about audience and context is becoming more important for how I approach my work.

The realities of working in game audio Ubisoft

After my experience at Virtuos Game and thinking about interactive storytelling, I started to look more seriously at what working in game companies actually means in reality. Now I feel like there are a lot of practical things I didn’t think about before.

When I look at companies like Ubisoft, the scale of production is much bigger than what I imagined. A game is not made by one person, but by large teams across design, programming, art and audio. This means sound design is only one part of a much larger system. It needs to fit into game mechanics, timing, technical limitations… rather than existing on its own.

From my own experience in game audio, I realised that a lot of the work is not about “creating freely”, but about solving problems. For example, how to make a sound respond correctly to player actions, how to avoid repetition, or how to make audio work in different environments in the game. It’s quite technical and requires a lot of testing and adjustment.

This made me understand that working in this industry requires more than just creative ideas. It also needs technical skills, communication, and the ability to work within constraints. Compared to exhibition work, where I could decide everything myself, here I need to adapt to a system and work with others.

At the same time, the advantages of working in big game company is attractive, the work can reach a much larger audience, and the result is part of a complete experience for players.

For me, this feels more realistic as a future career direction. It’s not as free as purely artistic work, but it is more stable and structured. I feel this shift from individual practice to collaborative production is something I need to develop further.

The realities of working in the creative industries

After the Gallery 46 exhibition, I started to think more seriously about what it actually means to work as an artist. Before that, I was more focused on making work and exploring ideas, but during the preparation and the exhibition itself, I began to question how sustainable this kind of practice is in reality.

For the Gallery 46 exhibition, I created a sculpture combined with projection, focusing on the living conditions of local women in Tanzania. I really enjoyed the process. I think my way of thinking is quite logical and structured, so I approached the work almost like building a system, connecting visuals, space and meaning together. During the exhibition, I also observed how audiences interacted with my work. Everyone seemed to have their own interpretation, and I think that’s one of the most interesting parts of exhibition-based work.

But at the same time, I felt a kind of distance. People came into the space I circled, experienced the work I created, and then they left. I started to question what happens after that. Does the work actually change anything? Does it help with the issues it is trying to represent? Or is it more about expressing personal ideas and emotions within a limited context?

This made me think about what Hesmondhalgh (2019) describes in relation to the creative industries, where a lot of artistic work is shaped by unstable conditions, freelance structures, and limited financial security. It made me realise that working as an independent artist, especially in exhibition contexts, can be difficult to sustain longterm.

“No matter how effective education and training may be in fostering creative talent and shaping it to meet market requirements, increasing reliance on short-term contracts and freelance working practices make life-long careers in the creative industries unsustainable for many”.

“Creative work is generally characterised by precocity, making adaptive skills and the ability to manage uncertainty highly vital”.

“Cultural work has become regarded less as a stable continuity and much more a series of discontinuous events; a job-to-job or freelance existence marked by discontinuity”.

The Cultural Industries, David Hesmondhalgh, 2019

I don’t think this means exhibition work is not valuable. I would still like to explore it more during my studies. But for my future career, I feel I need a different kind of structure. I started to think more about working in industries like games or film, where creative work is part of a larger system and can reach a wider audience.

At the moment, I’m more interested in applying for sound design roles in companies like Ubisoft, while also looking at opportunities in film or animation. It feels like a more realistic path, compared to trying to survive as a freelance artist without stability.

I think this is still something I’m figuring out, but the exhibition was a turning point for me. It helped me understand not just what I enjoy doing, but also what kind of working life I can realistically see myself in.

Interactive storytelling in games

The most ambitious promise of the new narrative medium is its potential for telling stories about whole systems. The format that most fully exploits the properties of digital environments is not the hyper-text or the fighting game but the simulation: the virtual world full of interrelated entities, a world we can enter, manipulate, and observe in process. We might therefore expect the virtuosos of cyberdrama to create simulated environments that capture behavioral patterns and patterns of interrelationships with a new clarity.

Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, 1997, Janet Murray

Not only is the computer the most capacious medium ever invented, but it also allows us to move around the narrative world, shifting from one perspective to another at our own initiative. Perhaps this ability to shift perspectives will lead to the technical innovation that will rival the Shakespearean soliloquy. Cyberdramatists of the future could present us with a complex world of many characters (like a global Victorian novel) and allow us to change positions at any moment in order to see the same event from the viewpoint of another character. Or they could let us enter a particular town over and over again in the guise of many different individuals, enabling us to see how differently the same people present themselves to us. We might be given a compelling role within the environment that confers upon us the ability to fluidly switch between viewing the world through our own character’s eyes and viewing our character through the eyes of others. Or perhaps a cyberdramatist of the future will find a way to show us not just the large battlefield and the single soldier (as Tolstoy does in War and Peace) but also the processes by which large historic events emerge as the sum of many much smaller causes (as Tolstoy strove to convey in his interpolated essays but could not dramatically capture). All of these story patterns would be ways of enacting the contemporary human struggle to both affirm and transcend our own limited point of view.

Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, 1997, Janet Murray

When thinking about storytelling in games, I started to look at Janet Murray’s ideas in Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997). She talks about how digital media, especially games, are not just another way to tell stories, but a completely different kind of narrative system. Instead of following a fixed story, players can move inside a world, interact with it, and experience different perspectives.

What I find interesting is her idea that games are more like “systems” rather than traditional narratives. In films, the story is already decided (FIXED), and the audience follows it from beginning to end. But in games, the story is not always fixed. It depends on the player’s actions, decisions, and movement in the world. So in a way, the story is always changing, even if the structure is designed by developers.

Murray also talks about the ability to shift perspectives, and I think this is something that really defines interactive storytelling. In games, you are not just watching a character, you are inside the experience. Sometimes you act as the character, sometimes you observe, and sometimes you are switching between different roles without even noticing. This creates a different kind of immersion compared to film.

Thinking about my own experience, especially during my internship at Virtuos, I started to see how this works in practice. Sound in games is not just there to support the atmosphere, but also to respond to the player. For example, different actions trigger different sounds, and these sounds help the player understand what is happening in the system. It becomes part of the interaction, not just the background.

At the same time, I don’t think games completely replace traditional storytelling. Instead, they open up another way of experiencing it. What Murray describes as “cyberdrama” still feels very relevant today, especially with open-world games where players can explore, repeat, and experience the same world differently each time.

For me, this idea of interactive storytelling is important for how I think about multimedia practice. I’m starting to realise that working in games is not just about making sound or visuals, but about designing experiences that people can move through and react to. It’s still something I’m trying to understand, but I feel this way of thinking is shaping how I see my future work.

Storytelling across Games, Film and Digital Media

Before I started my internship at Virtuos Game, I had an interview with the sound department manager. She looked through my previous work and noticed that most of my experience was in film and documentary sound, rather than games.

She asked me a question that I didn’t really think about before:

both film and games can be immersive, but what’s actually different about sound design between them?

At that moment, I tried to explain it in a simple way. I said that in film, sound feels more like a connection. It helps the audience follow the emotional changes in the visuals, and supports the narrative flow. Sound is there to guide how we feel about what we see.

But in games, I think sound works quite differently. It’s more like a signal. The player is not just watching, but interacting, so sound needs to respond to actions. It gives feedback, information, and sometimes even instructions. For example, a small sound can tell the player they did something right, or warn them about danger. So it’s not just emotional, it’s functional as well.

After that conversation, I started to realise that even though both film and games are trying to create immersive storytelling, they do it in very different ways. Film is more linear, while games are interactive and unpredictable. This also changes how sound is designed and used.

Thinking about my own practice, I feel I’m somewhere between these different forms. I started with film-based sound work, but through my experience in game audio, I’ve become more interested in interactive sound. I’m still figuring this out, but I think this shift is important for how I see my future direction in multimedia production.

The power of convergence is not that it allows a single story to be told in multiple media forms, but that it enables new forms of participation and engagement with those stories.

Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins

My future direction in multimedia

I want to work in multimedia production in the future, especially in sound design for games or film. I’m interested in roles like sound designer for open-world games, or working on audio for screen-based media, where sound can really shape how people experience something.

I started to think about this more seriously in my second year study, during the Sound for Screen module. One of the projects was to redesign the soundtracks for a scene, and I chose the anime, The Street of Crocodiles. The original version used a lot of background music to reflect the characters’ emotions, but in my version I focused more on sound effects. I tried to treat every small action as something that could produce sound, so even simple movements became part of the narrative.

Through doing that project, I realised I’m more interested in sound design as part of storytelling, rather than just making sound as an independent art form.

“Added value is what gives the (eminently incorrect) impression that sound is unnecessary, that sound merely duplicates a meaning which in reality it brings about, either all on its own or by discrepancies between it and the image”.

“When in any given sound environment you hear voices, those voices capture and focus your attention before any other sound… the voice acts as a stabilizer, a focal point for our attention”.

“Sound shows us the image differently than what the image shows alone, and the image likewise makes us hear sound differently than if the sound were ringing out in the dark”.

Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, Michel Chion

As Chion (1994) suggests, sound doesn’t just support the image, it can actually change how we understand it. I didn’t fully think about that before, but during this project I could feel how sound could guide attention and create meaning.

This made me rethink my direction a bit. Before, I was more focused on experimental sound, but now I feel more interested in working within a bigger production, where sound is part of something shared with a wider audience. That’s why I’m more drawn to industries like games or film, where sound is connected to visuals, interaction and narrative.

At the moment, I see my future direction as developing my skills in this area, and trying to find ways to combine technical work with storytelling. I’m still exploring this, but I feel this project was a key point where things started to become clearer for me.