The end of a second major project this trimester, and this one has by far been the most enjoyable and organised challenges I have tackled thus far. This project was a focus on interdisciplinary practise, and saw me working with games students to create audio assets for a single-screen platform game they were designing through the video game engine Unity.
Upon early discussions with the team, they revealed that they would like 3 original compositions that were to be played in the background during levels, as well as some ambience to make the environment of the game more realistic.
They passed along a reference track - Carl Stalling's 'Opening Theme' - which was orchestral, lighthearted and comedic. Upon further discussions though, the team revealed that they wanted something 'less complicated', or used less instruments, but still had that comedic feel. This worked for me just fine, as this was my first project where I would be composing all on my own!
I found that this composing element was a great challenge for me. In all my previous experience with music, even way back in high school, I had shied away from tackling any large scale composition projects such as this one. Looking back, I am so glad I took this challenge, as I am now more confident in the things I create, and have more experience showing my work to others (both audio-heads and not) for feedback. Confidence was a main soft skill that I wanted to improve on this trimester. In this composition project I also took the opportunity to try a new audio software, Avid's Sibelius, a music-writing program. This was quite a fruitful experience, and I learnt a lot about composition, the most important take-away probably being,"less is more". This thinking helped me compose two backing tracks for the games team to use, which was also heavily influenced by the research that I did - given that the game being designed was a pizza delivery adventure, my compositions were made up of lots of instruments and elements that are common in Italian folk music.
I think that the greatest strength of this project was the communication between the team and myself. Every week, we organised several face-to-face meetings to catch up on what we had worked on throughout the days prior and the weekend, which was always a sizeable amount of work and meant we were able to chip away at this project over just a few weeks. In the first few weeks we were very organised with paperwork which allowed us to quickly communicate exactly what was needed and what had and had not been completed as time went on. I was very impressed with the amount of progress we all brought to each other every week, and it definitely motivated me to work harder and harder.
I also felt that another personal strength in this project was my time management - I started looking at my calendar weeks in advance and cut back on shifts at my part-time job, in order to ensure that my work here was never second priority.
I was also able to try my hand at location recording, recording original samples to be used as sound effects in the game.
A few weeks into the project, a second audio student was also included in the project. This was a great help as it lightened the workload and allowed me to exercise more teamwork.
This project has definitely changed my perspective of game audio, and opened my eyes to a whole new niche of the industry that I definitely would not object to exploring further.
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