February 15, 2007 - The music featured in videogames has come a long way since the digitized 8-bit clinks and bleeps of old. These days it's not uncommon for a full-fledged orchestra to be utilized in the creation of an immersive and enthralling score for a videogame.
It is also no longer that uncommon for a well-known Hollywood composer to try his (or her) hand at composing a rich sonic tapestry for everything from an RPG to a first-person shooter. Such is the case with John Debney who up until this point in his career is best known for lacing such high profile silver screen projects as Sin City, The Passion of The Christ, End Of Days, and too many others to recount here, with his signature sound that mixes grandiose orchestral themes with strange and often exotic instrumentation and vocals to create sweeping pastiches of aural pleasure
Debney managed to put Hollywood on hold for a moment and dove headfirst into the realm of videogame composition for Sony's action/adventure epic Lair. While Debney is well-known amongst the Hollywood set, this was his first foray into the musical world of console gaming. Sadly, unlike the epic nature of Lair, the way Debney landed the gig as lead composer on the game was pretty routine. "My agent happened to be at some function and was talking to someone from Sony about videogames and then a few days later he received a phone call from Sony. They wanted to talk about whether or not he would consider putting the idea of scoring a videogame in front of his film composer clients. So I get a phone call from my agent asking 'Would you be interested in working on a videogame?' I said 'Sure, tell me about it.'
The more I learned about Lair and the idea behind it and the idea of pushing the envelope, it really interested me. So I took a couple of meetings with the Sony creative team and I liked them very much. I was really struck by the idea that they had, which was to create music that was really very cinematic in approach and that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. They were also interested in creating very specific themes for the different characters. So, in a way, it was very much like doing a film for me in that I created themes and then once those themes were approved sort of extrapolating from them and going from there."
As seemingly "routine" as Debney's hiring process may
have been, when it came to recording the score he didn't cut any corners. "To give you an idea, we have eight full CDs of material," he says. "We recorded for three days in London at Abbey Road Studios with a 90-piece orchestra. It was quite an ambitious undertaking."
A Large part of the ambitious nature of the project came with getting a little more creative freedom than he is usually accustomed to on a film project. "I would say I was probably given more [creative freedom on this project]", muses Debney. "That's one of the things that really appealed to me. With film, it's obviously also a creative process, but sometimes in films you get a lot of people who have a lot of opinions and you have to serve the director first, but you have to listen to all the other opinions, as well. With Lair I obviously had to listen to the director's ideas and work with those, but it was liberating in that they let me write different lengths of music. I didn't have to adhere really strictly to like 'This has to be 2-minutes and 3-seconds exactly.' So I could write a piece of music that would be maybe 4-minutes or 5-minutes and go through a lot of different variations. In that way I would say that there was more creative freedom than you're given on a film. Also just the scope of the game, which
lent itself to more themes than usually a normal film would have. In Lair I had six or seven main themes that we used a lot. That's a lot of themes compared to your normal film."Perhaps the main difference when composing for a videogame as opposed to a film is that the music for a game is eventually going to be rendered interactive, able to shift and mold itself to the varying degrees of game play. "Yes, that was a pre-requisite, of course," laughs Debney. "But they also didn't want to tie my hands. There were specific moment-of-changes that happen in the game where the music will change. That's all built into the music. However, they really wanted me to write the music as whole pieces that stand alone. What this means is that it's really predicated upon them to make sure that these moment changes work. In other words, in a 4-minute piece of music I could make a moment-of-change at 2-minutes and 30-seconds, but the way the music is constructed, the moment-of-change could occur anywhere. Again it was all designed to work that way. On their part they wanted the music to be more cohesive and not as much a slave to the moment-of-change. That was very liberating, as well."
What it all boiled down to is that the creators of Lair were trying to accomplish something new in terms of integrating music into the game. "The initial discussions we had were literally they wanted me to just write a symphonic work that would have themes and variations, but would also have movements," says Debney. "While that was a great idea, in practice it was a little bit difficult to do that. It's impossible, really at this stageat least it was for meto write a piece of music that really had so little relation to the game other than just a thematic thread. We were all trying to create something a little different and really it's going to be in the way that they edit the music that we're really gonna find out if this was something that was working or if it ends up making it harder for them. I don't think we know that yet, but at least we tried to go a little different way and let the music be a little more cohesive."
To this end, exactly how involved will Debney be with the editing of the music into the game? "I'm going to be very lightly involved in that they'll send me, from time to time, edits of pieces," says John. "You know, I can give my 2 cents worth, but it's certainly not incumbent upon me to tie their hands in a way now. They have to do what they have to do for the dictates of the game. As a courtesy they'll be sending me edits and I can give a thought or two. They've got some really terrific people that are composers themselves that were there at the scoring and have heard the music and have a really good idea of how it's going to work."
Tune in next Thursday, February 22nd for the second part of our interview with John Debney as he discusses the fidelity issue of writing the music for Lair as well as insight into the actual recording sessions for the game's score.