music, noises and other stuff
Armalion
Armalion: Worm Battle
May 19th
This is a piece from the upcoming film Armalion. With Nico Mendrek’s permission it featured in an insert on Afro Cafe on SABC2 last week (I’ll try and upload that video soon), so I’m sure he doesn’t mind if I post it here.
In this scene, our heroes are set upon by a giant dragon summoned from the abyss. Obviously they have to fight it. It eats most of the nameless support cast before being vanquished by a spellcasting witch who turns it on the evil villain. All in all, a fun scene.
I like it because I got to make use of big choirs singing faux-latin (lyrics concocted by my friend Jacques van Heerden) when the beast appears. This is, of course, all done in software, using a library called Voices of the Apocalypse, and its associated VOTA utility that lets you type in syllable by syllable the words you’d like the choir to sing.
East West have since replaced and updated this with a product called Symphonic Choirs which, while being marvellously versatile, does not, in my opinion, sound anything like as good despite drawing on a 35GB library of 24-bit samples.
Also I got to do some nifty sound design during the spellcasting bit, which is made up of choir dischord clusters, reversed recordings of people talking, and the sound a plastic pipe makes when you drown it in reverb. I love my job.
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Overture
Feb 29th
While I can’t currently post my commercial work, here’s a personal project. This piece of music began life as a statement of ideas for Intrepid. Strangely, none of the themes it contains made it into the final soundtrack, though perhaps some elements did.
It is also something of a stress test for my new composing rig: I now have a dedicated server to compliment my main composing machine. This piece uses 5 instances of Kontakt across 2 machines. It works better than I hoped, but I still want at least another two servers. Dammit, Hans Zimmer uses 9.
Ah well.
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This piece is now in my showreel, but speaking of things classical, my work on Armalion is drawing to a close, my self-imposed deadline being this weekend. As soon as it’s delivered I’ll be posting chunks of it here.
Amalion – it’s underway
Jun 30th
I’m currently working on the score for a German sword & sorcery fanfilm called Armalion, based on the computer game, in turn based on the minitures game of the same name. This will be my second collaboration with Nic Mendrek from Almost No Budget Films (I love that name) – last year I contributed some music to his epic adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies.
It’s fun to be working with Nic again, and his work has really progressed by leaps and bounds since his last film.
This snippet of music is the introduction sequence.
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