In the film industry, or more specifically Hollywood,
convergence within game development has arrived. It's happened fast,
and in a very big way. The next generation landscape promises even more
integration and spectacle in this direction. In this three-part feature
we will take a look at how the three different aspects of game audio,
music, sound effects and dialogue, are affected by that arrival.
We
begin part one with an overview of music, taking a look at the opening
of the interactive world to Hollywood composers and the record
industry, and how that content is becoming integrated into video games.
New Musical Structures: Communicating Interactive Structures to Traditionally Linear Film Composers
Migration from, not to Hollywood
For
designer, producer or sound director, working with composers, not to
mention big name Hollywood composers, can be a challenge. Here we
consider the inherent differences between content and structure in both
cinema and video game music.
It
is often said that the games industry is perceived by composers as a
stepping stone, where one can train, or at the very least get paid, until film or real work
comes along. Over the last five years the stepping stone has
transformed and now offers far easier navigation in the opposite
direction. Being a small budget game composer has never really
represented a clear path into linear post production of mainstream
cinema, whose roles and employment hierarchy are rigidly defined after
over 100 years of industrial history. The most talented Hollywood film
composers are instead migrating to games, larger audio budgets enable
publishers to bypass the ‘sample based' and employ the best composers,
arrangers and orchestras working in Hollywood. This allows the games
industry unprecedented access to the highest quality of cinematic
music.
Danny Elfman's recent work on Big Blue Box's Fable, and the more recent mention of Howard Shore's involvement in Webzen's SUN
instigates a trend for name composers that is equally becoming
established for Hollywood voice talent, sound effects creation and
screen writing. Hollywood's finest actors for example are now lured to
games by the fact that, among other incentives, rather than embarking
on a year-long training and pre-production schedule, and rigorous and
tiring location shooting on a film, they can earn similar money for
doing a few day's of voice work in a comfortable sound studio.
There
is a proven economic advantage to employing name actors and name
composers on a video game; it gives public relations a hook to grab
onto and to generate much larger PR budgets, this directly equating to
increased revenue. Ask any producer how sound can sell more copies of a
game and you will get the same answer: big name voice talent. Now that
the score is moving into that realm - it is time for the composers in
our industry to integrate on a much larger scale. (1)
The
incentives for the Hollywood composer are evident. Working on a game
actually affords the composer a temporal luxury in that the development
time on a large game far outstrips the small amount of time they would
have to work on a feature film. Traditionally a feature film commission
requires that the entire score is written, arranged and recorded as
soon as a temp edit of the film is created. There are exceptions to
this, the film composer Gabriel Yared works exclusively on a film title
from day one of a project until it is completed; however, not many
composers have this luxury. A final edit may result in a few changes to
the timings and structure of the piece, but that period of time between
the temp edit and the final edit is pretty much all the time the
composer has to fully flesh out the score. So let's take a look at the
videogame/film music landscape.
Bill Brown, composer for videogames such as The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth as well motion pictures such as Michael Mann's Ali, Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday, and recently the television series CSI New York, suggests:
“First,
I think something that is worth sharing is how qualitatively speaking,
games, films, and TV music are merging. Over the past 10 years, we
have been slowly bringing the consciousness of the value of live
orchestra (that is taken for granted in films now) into games. […]
Another thing that comes to mind is the ‘cinematic' approach to video
games. This to me means more attention is being paid to how music is
working to support the narrative of the game - music is now taking the
next step in gaming to become a deeper part of the story-telling
experience. Game developers are truly interested in the depth and
dimension music brings to their product and are willing to invest more
now than ever to take their project to that next level. Developers
really understand that a 60-90 piece orchestra sounds better than
orchestra samples and that makes a difference in the impact of their
game. Triple-A titles and A-List films are enlisting some of the same
players today. Howard Shore, one of my favorite composers, is included
in that new cross-over group of artists. This concept of cross-over
artists is becoming more and more the standard for our industry.” (2)
The
fact that names like Howard Shore or Danny Elfman are mentioned with
such excitement in game music circles reveals a great deal about music
in games, especially as Elfman only wrote a main theme for Fable. Why aren't we talking about the other composers on Fable
who adapted, fleshed out and integrated this ‘theme' into the core
mechanics of the game? This is again representative of the way that
games are marketed, in a similar way to films. There is probably little
difference in terms of quality the ‘non-name' composers on Fable and the work that Elfman did; however, Elfman's name is the currency. It is his name that is used as an index of quality in the public mind.
Garry Schyman, composer of music for both games Destroy All Humans and Voyeur, and films Lost In Africa, Horse Player and The Last Hour, argues:
“When
truly creative opportunities present themselves composers, even
Hollywood 's most famous, will want to get on board. Games have evolved
to a point where game music has become as important an element to games
as it is to films, and the quality expected by game companies is very
high now. I think game music is the place to be at the moment for any
composer interested in plying his or her trade. What is likely is that
composers will cross over back and forth between the two genres.” (3)
This
idea of a crossover artist is something that both Bill Brown and Garry
Schyman see as clear for the future of composers. A future where there
will be no categorization of either ‘game' or ‘film', but simply
‘composers.'
There
are some interesting reasons why the games industry would look to a
composer of Elfman's caliber. It can be viewed as a sea change for game
composition that breaks down some previous boundaries - in the eyes of
gamers, critics and the composers themselves, games are becoming
recognized as serious cultural artifacts. This is intensified by the
huge sales the medium is generating, not to mention the maturing and
stratification of the overall core demographic of gamers and game
creators.