Composer’s blog: episode 3 – setting up Sunday, 12 April 2009

I was very excited when I finally received the animation rough of episode 3 from Binary Fable; the script, storyboards and animatic had already given me a very good idea of how the story would go, but seeing the characters move and speak on screen really helped to get the musical ideas bubbling!

Before I had written any music, I had decided that it would be important to keep a sense of musical unity between episode 3 and the previous episodes by making reference to existing musical themes. It was lucky that Alexis had established some great thematic material, which had been skilfully carried on by Blair. I hoped that episode 3 would also allow me to put my own ‘stamp’ on the music. I am used to writing music for fairly large ensembles, so I was sure that composing the score for three players to perform would be a fun and interesting challenge.

I have two very useful computer programs in my music studio that are usually my first port of call when I begin a project; a program called Logic that I use to map out my ideas, and another program called Sibelius that allows me to notate my music so that it can be read and played by live musicians. Different composers have different ways of working, but I often like to have both programs running at the same time, so that I can improvise and experiment in Logic, and then refine the music in Sibelius. My studio has two monitors so that I have plenty of space to run both programs!

[Editor's note: Michael's written two more pieces about his work on episode 3; we'll post them tomorrow and on Tuesday so come back to find out more...]