Trying Something Different

Back in June, for the first time, I decided to take part in a competition hosted by the sample library company Spitfire Audio in collaboration with HBO. The task of the competition was to score a short 4-minute scene from an episode of 'Westworld'. There ended up being thousands of entries with many different approaches and styles, the winner ended up being (which some saw as quite daring) a rock 8-bit/chiptune hybrid score additionally using SFX that would've been commonly heard in games such as 'Super Mario Brothers'. Personally, I thought it was a brilliant well-produced piece written by David Kudell that's well worth a watch, however, the choice was incredibly controversial with even Hans Zimmer chiming in on it! You can watch the winning entry here.

My entry is a lot more simplistic/minimalist in contrast to Kudell's, though the intention I had at the time was to approach scoring the clip in a way I hadn't before by bringing composition techniques and sound design that I often use in other projects. One technique is to use percussive soundscapes I had recorded previously and splice them up in a way I could use them as rhythm sets. They're subtle but the most obvious example starts at 02:57 in the clip below.

As you can hear, the style I ended up going for was somewhere in between electronic glitch music and light rock. In preparation, I did light research around the origin of the clip and the general story of 'Westworld' so I wouldn't somehow creatively stunt myself since there wasn't too much restriction in the way of how I could approach scoring such! Some people, of course, wrote their music around the overall concept of the episode the clip is taken from, others deliberately ignored this. I purposefully close the latter and decided to be inspired only by the general synopsis of the show and follow my gut feeling on what would work.

All in all, this was a great (and very fun) experience and I would love to try other competitions like this! If you would like me to score something for you then feel free to drop me a message here.

Chi~

#music #filmscoring #competition #westworld #scoring #composing