Hi everyone,
I posted an intro on the 'introduce weekend' recently and Karen Ross suggested I share what I posted here in the composing lounge. So I thought I'd introduce myself properly.
I've been a composer for 30 yrs, first 20 in games and last 10 in film, tv too. Games were all encompassing, projects' could take years and have hours of content, my co-writer and I were first noticed by film & tv guys when we'd be doing orchestral sessions mid 00's and they'd say 'this is for a game? You guys should do Film & TV!'. We tried, but tbh failed, largely because we ascribed the same business mentality we'd learned in games, turns out they're wildly different. A decade ago we got contacted by folks who'd played games we'd scored as kids, who were now making their own Film/TV project and asked if we'd like to score it. This was our way in, helped by a paradigm shift in how games were seen. Hoorah!
Our output's pretty eclectic, film folks seemed to like the gaming lens we'd view their project through, something I thought was a negative is now viewed as a plus, hoorah! We're contemporary acoustic composers, love world music and mixing shit up. We've got a couple of features out this year, Hating Peter Tatchell (w. Ian McKellen & Stephen Fry), and 'Me, Myself and Di' (w. Lucy Pinder & Katy Clayton). The former recording a string section individually during lockdown was an eye-opening experience and the latter our first colliery brass band. on TV, 'Dead Pixels' has just aired S2 on E4 in the UK (in the US on the CW later this year). The gamer comedy had a ton of fantasy music, retro 8 & 16-bit game cues and even a live orchestral theme tune sung by the cast, was most fun.
On a personal note, I'm a HUGE sci-fi nerd, (from Blakes 7 to The Expanse, fave show B5) but I've not had much chance to score it, largely because we hit a fruitful vein with our fantasy scores to MediEvil and have ridden the wave ever since - see below - if anyone's working on it, I'd be most up for assisting ;-)
Karen suggested I share the little film about us I put on the introducing me weekend so I'll leave with that. "MediEvil" is Sony's macabre gothic fantasy PlayStation series, a franchise we've scored since 1998. Last summer Sony America asked if we'd like to make a little film about our work on the music since the latest MediEvil for the PS4 was going to be free on PSNow that Halloween. We, along with Sony, the games developers, the RPO, musical friends and a video production team had great fun making it, I hope you enjoy it too. Thanks for reading!
Barn (wot everyone knows me as!)
www.bobandbarn.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn1d_6v-AWk
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Ooo, "The Sounds of Space" - what a great topic! How did you approach the design for it? What kind of things did you research?
Great question Kay. I have a very lengthy answer so apologies in advance. XD
So the first thing I did was research the game itself because I still haven't played Space Engineers (sorry guys XD). I did...
Expand commentGreat question Kay. I have a very lengthy answer so apologies in advance. XD
So the first thing I did was research the game itself because I still haven't played Space Engineers (sorry guys XD). I did this to get an idea of the sorts of things people do in the game and what it meant to me. This is what gave me the title because I've always thought of space as "A Hostile Environment", and the idea of the game is to build and repair ships etc to navigate or "Conquer" it.
The next thing I did was have a look at the music of Space Engineers. I discovered some great music here. It was a really diverse mix of orchestral and electronic sounds which is a sound combination I've worked very well with on other projects. I also had a look at other music science fiction works, from John Williams score for Star Wars which uses a very traditional orchestral score to Hanz Zimmers score for Interstellar which was a beautiful mix of surreal electronic sounds and some orchestral instruments with an intense church organ thrown into the mix. I discovered lots of very different approaches to create emotional pieces of music, all of which were very effective.
Then it was time for me to create something. I started experimenting with a vast range of electronic sounds first of all. The key was to find a sound, manipulate it in all sorts of different ways to see if I can get the right sound for the project, before layering these sounds together. This developed an initial section (which I eventually cut because it didn't fit with the rest of my ideas).
I wasn't sure where to take it next so I had a listen through some of my less successful projects (basically music I haven't finished or published because it was awful) and found a piece with the perfect melody. The piece itself didn't work well so I decided to take this melody and include it and started orchestrating it. I kept the orchestral theme because I felt this was the right way to get the intensity in the piece. The melody was perfect because it allowed me to incorporate a variety of major and minor chords to give it the "hostile" feel, but also the triumphant "conquering" feel. The piece grew from there and I managed to create one of my best pieces of music with a mix of highs and lows, calm and fast-paced action, and orchestral and electronic sounds.
As I mentioned in my post, I didn't, but this is still one of the best pieces of music I have created and I am extremely proud of it. :)