Project 1 Underway!

Recently had my first day back at uni and I'm excited to say that one of my first projects ever is under way! I've teamed up with 3 girls who I know will be really fun to work with and we have already planned the groundwork of how our project is going to work out.

Our first ideas were to create a soundtrack for either a film or animation, and were going towards a dark and sad theme. My first ideas were to create a song by incorporating our own individual musical tastes but after, I preferred to do something different to challenge my skills, such as creating a soundtrack.

We searched through a variety of short animations and focused on some of the short animations that we knew and liked, which also incorporated sad themes. Most of the animations that we watched were good but didn't really have the elements we were looking for so we noted them down for future references. We also started to collect reference soundtracks from films that we all individually liked such as the Stranger Things Theme song and one track from the Blade Runner film.

Our group then came up with the idea of doing a soundtrack for a game which was when one of our team members suggested a game called 'Inside'. The game is platform adventure game about a boy who explores various dark environments and is trying to escape. You control what the boy does or where he goes and the game will eventually reveal to you the plot-twisting backstory of the game.

As we watched the gameplay walkthrough, we immediately decided that it was going to be the chosen stimulus for our soundtrack. We were attracted to the incredible high quality graphics of the game as well as how tense it made us feel while watching the walkthrough. It also had an excellent portrayal of the dark theme that we wanted and it made us brainstorm a bunch of new ideas. Most of the members in our group have played dark/horror themed games so we had a good idea of how a soundtrack for this type of genre would sound like. Before we watched the gameplay, we already planned reference tracks that would suit a dark theme so this game began to really tie in well with our plans. Because the gameplay walkthrough video is over an hour long, we started to plan which part of the video we'd like to use and also started to think about the types of instruments we could use.

My team and I were really happy and surprised that we developed a good-enough plan that we could easily start working on. It was definitely a productive start to the new trimester and it was fun bouncing ideas off one another and hearing the other members' thoughts and interests. I'm really excited to start working on my first project and am keen to learn new things about creating music specifically for games.