Recording - June 2010 - 51

Continued from page 49 year, not every months, but every game. There are just numerous, almost infinite ways to implement music into games and to compose music into games, and this field is so young, and the innovation inside is so interesting. So, basically, you could almost say that 50% of composing music for video games is the actual composition, which is interesting enough. But the other 50% is: OK, how would you take this music and implement it into the game? And this part you don’t have in movies, and it is very compelling. So do the programmers who are doing the code for the game—just as they would make a guy with a sword show up after you kill the guy with the swinging ball with spikes on it—they trigger all that stuff, the interactivity? Same thing happens musically, that they have multiple stems of different tracks, and it knows if you accomplish this interactive task it brings in another stem? If you walk into the next room, it brings in another cue. So the music is actually programmed much like a picture would be. Is that a correct statement? Inon: Yeah, you definitely could say so. But again, there are so many other ways to attack it. We talked about stems, now how about variations? Why don’t we say that we’ll write one two-minute cue, and this cue will be totally ambient, OK? And then take the exact same cue and just add on to it some kind of more movements—a little percussion, a little strings—and then we’ll take the exact same cue and add a lot of percussion, a lot of movements, a lot of strings. So, basically, what you get is—you don’t get stems—you get three different variations on the same cue. Now, basically, just imagine to yourself three lines and it could just go up, go up, and these three cues are all the time in synch. So when you move between the ambient—what we call moving from the B level to the C level—it’s almost seamless from one hand, but from the other hand, the energy is really being picked up. This is another example… It’s mind-boggling. I used to be an audio-post engineer. After I quit making records, I moved to New York and became an audio-post engineer. So I understand what you’re saying, but it has gone way beyond the stuff I was used to doing. Cris, when you’re meeting with the producer of the game, or with the point guy who coordinates with the music guy and the coding guy and the art guys, is that called a director or producer of the game? Cris: It depends on the company, who they’ve got internally. But usually there’s an audio director, and that’s the point of contact. OK, so does the audio director bring you guys into a conference room, shows you some drawings of the new game, explains what it’s about, explains why

it’s different, and that they’ve got his brilliant idea for the music. And you go, “Yeah, we can do that! We love your vision.” And then, how do they translate to you guys how many stems they’re gonna need, or how many different variations that Inon just described? It almost sounds like you’d need kind of like a spreadsheet of things that you need to bang out for them. Is that a fair statement? Cris: Yeah, well, when we get the spreadsheet, that’s when you start sweating. But the process is complicated. I think, in theory, what we are delivering is fairly standard. Like those two ways you said—like maybe variations on a cue, the ambience, the medium, the tension, the full-on action, or stems. And that’s really common in every game, doing either of those. I think the trick, and what

sheet with exactly what cues are needed for what area. That might change, but it’s pretty organized. And like Cris was saying, it can be pretty daunting when you look at it for the first time. When you get the e-mail, you sort of take a deep breath, then you open it up and you close your eyes, then you open them and you go, Oh God! And then you only have a short amount of time to write it. What is the amount of time? Sascha: Well, actually, you have longer than a movie, I would say. A movie is like … what’s the average? Inon: Between three to six weeks for a movie. Sascha: We have a lot longer, right? Like two months? Cris: It depends on when you come into the development process. If you’re in there early and the game isn’t coming out for a year, you won’t spend a year writing music, but, essentially, you have maybe a year to work on it. Sascha: Prototype, for example, was … How long? A year? Cris: Yeah, but there are other things that we have done where we got the assignment and two weeks later we were at Skywalker Ranch recording the score. It’s all over the place. Bob: There really are so many more variables in games in all aspects of it. But when you talk about what is the time allocated for a film versus a game, and all that sort of good stuff, it’s a completely different story. A film, generally speaking, they will allow you six weeks to score it. However, it’s locked; the picture is locked. That’s it, and it ain’t gonna change. With games, you may take three months to a year, and you’re constantly dealing with … Not necessarily will the picture change, but the interaction, the interactivity will change—the game play. It’s an evolution kind of a thing. There are two parts of a game, actually—the cinematics and the game play itself. The cinematics, of course, are a picture. They’ll often give you a picture when they hire you, then you’ll score to this locked picture, and then they’ll use that picture as a trailer to advertise and promote the game. And how far in advance of the release of the game will that come out? Bob: Sometimes three months to a year. So you guys could be hired a year out. I don’t want to interrupt your flow—keep going. Bob: Well, that’s really about it. But in that oneyear period, as Cris mentioned, you’re not working the entire year. They just call you up periodically and say, “OK, I’ve got 10 minutes of music I need written…” Continued on page 53
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“The whole rhythm is totally different [than film scoring]… The whole process is much longer and slower, so you have more time to develop what you want.” —Inon Zur
makes it interesting to be a game composer and doing interactive music—especially when you’re doing the stems version—you really want to almost play the stems back to yourself and say, “OK, what are all the combinations?” I mean, you can’t go through them all. What if it’s just low strings and percussion? Do they sound OK together? What if now it’s high strings and brass, and percussion halfway through, and then everything out, and just voices? Does it all still work as a composition when you pull things out from the full track? That’s kind of the magic of it. Sascha, do you guys have to write in terms of thinking of editing? Like, a film composer might think, “OK, I’m going to do it in this time signature because these hit points in the picture that I’ve already seen in the first cut forces me to write in this time signature.” Do you have to consider time signatures and edit points for video games as well? Sascha: You know for the actual game play, besides the time limit of the particular cue, we can pretty much do whatever we want to do in terms of time signature. I guess for the cinematics, which are sort of like the movies within games, introduction or whatever, there might be some restrictions. But I think I have not discovered or come across any restrictions of time signatures. Inon: By the way, it’s really interesting what you say about who you work with, because that’s just changed between every company. For example, with EA you’ll work with a producer usually; with Sony you’ll work with a developer; Ubisoft you’ll work with a crazy guy. [laughter] I mean, it really changes, so you really have to adapt yourself to who you work with. Sascha: Usually with the AAA titles, all their directors have their stuff together. You get a spread-

Recording - June 2010

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