Category: Interviews

By Gareth Von Kallenbach

TitanFall Composer Stephen Barton Calls Game An Immensely Fast, Kinetic Experience

Recently we got the chance to speak with composer Stephen Barton about his work in the film and game industry. Stephen has recently worked on the score for the impressive looking game TitanFall and was kind enough to talk about the experience with us. The full interview will appear in our Feb 2014 magazine issue but we are posting selections from the interview now.

How does scoring a game compare and differ with that of a movie or television show and which do you prefer?

The actual composing of music for them is really much the same – the differences are more in the process and in the structure. With a movie in particular (unless something goes very badly wrong, which has happened on occasion) you know in essence what the film will look like, what the story arc is going to be, what scene will come where, and where the ebb and flow of the music should go. The soundtracks for games always seem to come together in a much more evolutionary way. You experiment with different textures and levels of intensity and the benchmark is trying those out in game, which is where the Respawn guys are excellent guides – when you have a team of developers with such a clear vision and drive, it’s a great process.

What were some of the biggest challenges you faced scoring Titanfall and what have been your greatest triumphs?

Biggest challenge – finding the themes, the signature sounds. That’s always the hardest part. The greatest triumphs would have to be a large symphony orchestra in Abbey Road bringing the organic parts of the score to life and hearing the final mix in game. Even after forty or so projects, hearing it brought to life, then finished and working away in context is always a real pleasure that never really diminishes.

How many hours of music did you compose for the game and how much made it into the final build?

There’s just under 2 hours of music in the final game – but with alternate versions, passes that didn’t make it into the game, cues that hit the cutting room floor, I’d imagine there must be about 3 hours, maybe more. There’s lots of pieces we went through numerous tiny tweaks on, so in some ways it’s hard to say for sure!

When scoring the game, how much lead time did you have and were graphics and animation made available early in the process?I spent about eight months on the game total. I’d have little Quicktime movies of certain sequences, but because the game is all multiplayer and you never really get the same outcomes twice, the team would make me three or four minute long example “gameplay videos”, which I’d have on loop on a screen in the studio whilst writing. The lighting in particular in Titanfall is very evocative and the visuals were a big inspiration and guide to the tone of the music.

As a follow up, how much did the score change if any as I am guessing the look and feel of the game continued to change and evolve during production.

The basic ideas didn’t change too much – we had the concept for two signature sounds, one for the IMC and one for the Militia. It was more a process of distillation, trying to focus things down to the very core of what we were after. I suppose it’s a little like making whisky! Particularly on the IMC side, Steve Fukuda and Erik Kraber (director and audio lead on the game) came up with this description of a “fuzzy wall of distortion”. We wanted to find a sound that sounded like it couldn’t be contained – a big, synthetic, distorted tone or instrumentation that had an edge to it.

Crucially though, we weren’t after a typical guitar amp or pedal kind of distortion, which is often grittier, but more of a fuzzy kind of tone which when you sit it back with other things gives you this feeling of weight, power and an uncontainable force. We went through quite a number of ideas of how to achieve that before finding the tone, which turned out to be a combination of analog synthetic elements and a larger orchestral ensemble, where you don’t hear the definition so much of the individual instruments, which seemed fitting to represent a huge corporation where conformity and perfection through technology is the watchword.

What can you tell us about the game and where you drew your inspirations
when scoring the game?

It’s an immensely fast, kinetic experience that for me is quite different to the world of Call of Duty or any other FPS. I’ve found when I’ve played it that if you play it using those old tried and tested strategies you’ll generally get killed quickly! It’s much more 3-dimensional, much faster, and the differences between the Titans and their Pilots mean you have to think quite differently about how you play. There’s been a few times where I’ve been on the ground floor of a building and seen an enemy Titan walk past, and there’s almost this Jurassic Park, T-Rex moment of “I hope they don’t see me”.

As to inspiration – there were lots of little ideas that informed aspects of the score – usually techniques that I hear that I think I can put a new spin on – but the vision the guys had for what they wanted was really clear. Mostly it was experimentation, playing around with the concepts and seeing what combinations best fit.

How much leeway did you have with the creation of the score or did EA and the game producers give you the framework that you had to work in or was it more of a collaboration?

It’s entirely collaborative – I’d have briefs and a list of possible modules, but that was always in flux. I’d write for a couple of days and then send over the work in progress tracks to Respawn, they’d drop them into the game and we’d talk about how they were working, what was effective, what was less effective – and gradually hone down each cue until it was ready to record.

Original article – http://sknr.net/2014/02/06/titanfall-interview-with-composer-stephen-barton/ – By Gareth Von Kallenbach

Our own BRANDON JERWA has been interviewing some top-notch comic talent for the DYNAMIC FORCES website, and we’re happy to share those interviews with you!

Brandon recently spoke with KELLY SUE DeCONNICK, superstar writer of CAPTAIN MARVEL, GHOST, PRETTY DEADLY, AVENGERS ASSEMBLE and much more!

1. As a fellow Pacific Northwestern comic creator, maybe you can help me sort this out. How in the world did we become the massive funnybook nerd empire? I pretty much grew up here, so for me it wasn’t a case of being drawn from somewhere else. How did you find your way to Portland, and what makes you stay?

Beats me, bud!  You’re from here, shouldn’t you have better insight into the history of the place and how the migration happened?

I know in our case, my husband dated a girl in college who was from here and kind of fell in love with the town.  So it was always on our short list.  When we sat down over dinner to decide Where, it came down to Portland, Seattle or Austin.  I’d grown up in Austin and we wanted someplace that was new to us both, so Austin was out.  I thought Seattle was breathtakingly beautiful, but too expensive after Kansas City… Portland won by default.

The Bendises put us up for a couple weeks when we moved and they were so gracious, that pretty much sealed the deal.

You’ll never get rid of us now.

Mwah ah ha ha ha ha ha ha…

2. By all accounts, you really brought down the house with your panel appearances at the Image Expo. How does it feel to know that your words carry a fair amount of weight with your audience? Does it affect your spontaneity in those Q&A sessions/open discussions, or do you still just run with it?

I’m very comfortable on panels, so I mostly just try to have fun.  I got nervous during the Image Expo keynote — I hadn’t really given any thought to it until I was waiting backstage and suddenly was like, “um… now would be a good time to come up with an elevator pitch for this book, jackass.”

The panel stuff, though.  That’s just… try to be honest and don’t say anything that will get you fired.  Those are my Prime Directives.

3. As a parent and a comic creator, what kind of future would you like to see for your children – as fans, and/or professionals – from the industry as a whole?

I’d hope that they would be made to feel welcome, as fans, primarily, but as pros if they’re willing to bust their butts and that’s the path they choose.

You can find Brandon’s full interview with Kelly here:

http://www.dynamicforces.com/htmlfiles/interviews.html?showinterview=IN01231408641

DYNAMIC FORCES INTERVIEW: WALT FLANAGAN INTERVIEW BY BRANDON JERWA

Our own BRANDON JERWA has been interviewing some top-notch comic talent for the DYNAMIC FORCES website, and we’re happy to share those interviews with you!

First up: WALT FLANAGAN, star of AMC’s “Comic Book Men” and co-creator of the CRYPTOZOIC MAN comic from Dynamite.

1. I’d like to start by asking you to pretend that it’s sometime in the early 90s, before Clerks started production. If someone had told you that the movie would be a huge indie sensation spawning several sequels, you would go on to draw mainstream and indie comics (including a couple of BATMAN books), and eventually you’d have a TV series about your life running a comic shop…how would you have reacted?

I imagine my younger self being would be a bit skeptical of any one of the things you listed let alone all of them.

2. I left out “award-winning podcaster” in the first question, because telling you that part of the future would involve explaining what the internet would be, and what a podcast is. That would probably be a little bit like Marty McFly pretending to be an alien when he visited his dad in the 1950s. Even with a love of comics and science fiction, would you have had a big enough imagination to accept ideas like that when you were younger?

It’s pretty wild I admit but maybe not from a tech point of view with the concept of the internet and all that but more so because I’m a person who isn’t all that comfortable talking and interacting with people, so it is a bit of a head scratcher that I’m on a podcast let alone one that has won awards.

3. After you and Kevin Smith teamed up for BATMAN: CACOPHONY, you returned for THE WIDENING GYRE. That series needed a break after six issues, but it’s scheduled to return as BELLICOSITY in 2014. How’s that coming along?

The series is half done so we are just waiting for Kevin to clear some space on his schedule to finish it up…but I’m very excited for people to see how it wraps up.

http://www.dynamicforces.com/htmlfiles/news.html?showNews=DFN01071466014

Bonus link! Walt’s pal BRYAN JOHNSON was on the main GEEK NATION show, and we named his interview one of the BEST OF 2013!

http://media.kisw.com/a/85660502/bjgn-01-03-14-the-year-s-best-interviews-comic-book-men-s-bryan-johnson.htm

TitanFall Composer Stephen Barton Calls Game An Immensely Fast, Kinetic Experience

Recently we got the chance to speak with composer Stephen Barton about his work in the film and game industry. Stephen has recently worked on the score for the impressive looking game TitanFall and was kind enough to talk about the experience with us. The full interview will appear in our Feb 2014 magazine issue but we are posting selections from the interview now.

How does scoring a game compare and differ with that of a movie or television show and which do you prefer?

The actual composing of music for them is really much the same – the differences are more in the process and in the structure. With a movie in particular (unless something goes very badly wrong, which has happened on occasion) you know in essence what the film will look like, what the story arc is going to be, what scene will come where, and where the ebb and flow of the music should go. The soundtracks for games always seem to come together in a much more evolutionary way. You experiment with different textures and levels of intensity and the benchmark is trying those out in game, which is where the Respawn guys are excellent guides – when you have a team of developers with such a clear vision and drive, it’s a great process.

What were some of the biggest challenges you faced scoring Titanfall and what have been your greatest triumphs?

Biggest challenge – finding the themes, the signature sounds. That’s always the hardest part. The greatest triumphs would have to be a large symphony orchestra in Abbey Road bringing the organic parts of the score to life and hearing the final mix in game. Even after forty or so projects, hearing it brought to life, then finished and working away in context is always a real pleasure that never really diminishes.

How many hours of music did you compose for the game and how much made it into the final build?

There’s just under 2 hours of music in the final game – but with alternate versions, passes that didn’t make it into the game, cues that hit the cutting room floor, I’d imagine there must be about 3 hours, maybe more. There’s lots of pieces we went through numerous tiny tweaks on, so in some ways it’s hard to say for sure!

When scoring the game, how much lead time did you have and were graphics and animation made available early in the process?I spent about eight months on the game total. I’d have little Quicktime movies of certain sequences, but because the game is all multiplayer and you never really get the same outcomes twice, the team would make me three or four minute long example “gameplay videos”, which I’d have on loop on a screen in the studio whilst writing. The lighting in particular in Titanfall is very evocative and the visuals were a big inspiration and guide to the tone of the music.

As a follow up, how much did the score change if any as I am guessing the look and feel of the game continued to change and evolve during production.

The basic ideas didn’t change too much – we had the concept for two signature sounds, one for the IMC and one for the Militia. It was more a process of distillation, trying to focus things down to the very core of what we were after. I suppose it’s a little like making whisky! Particularly on the IMC side, Steve Fukuda and Erik Kraber (director and audio lead on the game) came up with this description of a “fuzzy wall of distortion”. We wanted to find a sound that sounded like it couldn’t be contained – a big, synthetic, distorted tone or instrumentation that had an edge to it.

Crucially though, we weren’t after a typical guitar amp or pedal kind of distortion, which is often grittier, but more of a fuzzy kind of tone which when you sit it back with other things gives you this feeling of weight, power and an uncontainable force. We went through quite a number of ideas of how to achieve that before finding the tone, which turned out to be a combination of analog synthetic elements and a larger orchestral ensemble, where you don’t hear the definition so much of the individual instruments, which seemed fitting to represent a huge corporation where conformity and perfection through technology is the watchword.

What can you tell us about the game and where you drew your inspirations
when scoring the game?

It’s an immensely fast, kinetic experience that for me is quite different to the world of Call of Duty or any other FPS. I’ve found when I’ve played it that if you play it using those old tried and tested strategies you’ll generally get killed quickly! It’s much more 3-dimensional, much faster, and the differences between the Titans and their Pilots mean you have to think quite differently about how you play. There’s been a few times where I’ve been on the ground floor of a building and seen an enemy Titan walk past, and there’s almost this Jurassic Park, T-Rex moment of “I hope they don’t see me”.

As to inspiration – there were lots of little ideas that informed aspects of the score – usually techniques that I hear that I think I can put a new spin on – but the vision the guys had for what they wanted was really clear. Mostly it was experimentation, playing around with the concepts and seeing what combinations best fit.

How much leeway did you have with the creation of the score or did EA and the game producers give you the framework that you had to work in or was it more of a collaboration?

It’s entirely collaborative – I’d have briefs and a list of possible modules, but that was always in flux. I’d write for a couple of days and then send over the work in progress tracks to Respawn, they’d drop them into the game and we’d talk about how they were working, what was effective, what was less effective – and gradually hone down each cue until it was ready to record.

Original article – http://sknr.net/2014/02/06/titanfall-interview-with-composer-stephen-barton/ – By Gareth Von Kallenbach