Lair composer interview

[EvilTaru]

http://music.ign.com/articles/765/765093p1.html

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v500/EvilTaru/Indifferent2.gif

[totobeni]

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."

1CD=650MB ...8CDs=5200MB= 5GB ...

Bridge Level only was 4 GB + other levels = ?? 50GB blu-ray needed ...

DVD-9 am cry :XD:

[LaLiLuLeLo]

yayyyy music in games!
lol 5GB.
I'm sure there won't be all 5 gb of music on the disc, after they edit and sample and so on, but just the same thank goodness for blu-ray discs.

[totobeni]

yayyyy music in games!
lol 5GB.
I'm sure there won't be all 5 gb of music on the disc, after they edit and sample and so on, but just the same thank goodness for blu-ray discs.

of coure there is some stuff will be cut n out but remember its "DD 7.1 uncompression"" ..so it will be at least 4.5 GB ...that for the the audio only :drool:

[Zer0-Sum]

1CD=650MB ...8CDs=5200MB= 5GB ...

Bridge Level only was 4 GB + other levels = ?? 50GB blu-ray needed ...

DVD-9 am cry :XD:

DAMN that is NUTZ!!! yah for BluRay!!!! DVD-9 = CRAP.....

[Z]

I love a great musical score in a game. it adds that extra dimension and flavor to the overall experience that the game just wouldn't be the same.
I don't know what the music in lair is like aside from the one featured in the promo demos. but judging from that, we are in for a treat. I expect Lair to have some of the best scores when the game launches. :)

[Zer0-Sum]

Hells yes Z. I can't agree more! God of War is one that comes to mind immediately. The aural symphonic sound made that game a feast for the ears. Movie quality music is the best. George Lucas said it so well when he said that a movie is 80% sound and 20% visuals. TRUE DAT!!:rockon: Same with games for sure.

[Sephiroth_VII]

Yeah ,we all know that Final Fantasy and MGS wouldn't be the same without the great soundtracks. It's definitely a very important part of a game!

[Z]

in the interview, he said that they made 6 or 7 musical themes for the game. that is a lot even by the composer's admission!
looks like I'll be ordering the official sound track for this baby. damn BD disc don't have audio ripping apps out yet...*looks suspiciously at of YDL*

[woundingchaney]

I hope they come through with the score but after hearing about how great Res. score would be and then flop leaves me a bit skeptical.

With Lairs concept and presentation a great classical big band score would definetely give a more epic feel. At least they arent doing the whole hard rock guitar riffs cliche (damn see that way too much these days).

[jaxmkii]

hip hip BR!

[Z]

I hope they come through with the score but after hearing about how great Res. score would be and then flop leaves me a bit skeptical.
though I never read about any score praise for Res. it doesn't really matter for me since Lair's composer is well known and the score I hear in the demo is very epic and great. sometimes you can tell something is going to be good by the first exposer. :)

[totobeni]

though I never read about any score praise for Res. it doesn't really matter for me since Lair's composer is well known and the score I hear in the demo is very epic and great. sometimes you can tell something is going to be good by the first exposer. :)

John Debney track record : http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002201/

i think he is a one great Composer

[VG Aficionado]

John Debney track record : http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002201/

i think he is a one great ComposerIt would be hard to hire someone with even more experience and dare I say talent. Lair has to be a very ambitious title.

[cliffbo]

John Debney Scores With Lair Pt. 1
Hollywood composer attacks his first videogame composition.
by Spence D.

US, 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 stage—at least it was for me—to 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."

[FantasyGhost]

While sonystradamus is already playing F1: CE and Motorstorm (http://genmay.com/showthread.php?t=715247), this guy says something weird.
sooooooo i recently learned that san andreas is aprox 17 square miles.

compared to lair... which has levels that are each 32x32 miles -- which equates to 1024 square miles for one levelhttp://genmay.com/showpost.php?p=20628504&postcount=226
No wonder it's gonna take that much space.

[VG Aficionado]

While sonystradamus is already playing F1: CE and Motorstorm (http://genmay.com/showthread.php?t=715247), this guy says something weird.
http://genmay.com/showpost.php?p=20628504&postcount=226
No wonder it's gonna take that much space.Is that 3D artwork he's leaking anything related to PS3?

[FantasyGhost]

it's stargate. all i found is that the game comes out on pc
stargate worlds

[Insane Metal]

I´ve captured the sound of the 720p videos that I have here, listen to it: http://w12.easy-share.com/899316.html

The ending on this is just awesome: http://w10.easy-share.com/899318.html

WOW !

+reps are welcome :D

[Jay Gee]

I like the sound of the Dragon when it attacks (I'm almost sure that's what it's doing the duration of the mp3), but I'm still spoiled by the epicness(?) of the Drakengard OST. But what I did hear sounded excellent.