Diablo 3 HD-Trailer. My re-score!

Hi there!

I really like the work and the animations that blizzard makes (cinematic-crew). I have always wanted to score the music for one of their cinematics. Jason Hayes, who made the music for the legendary game Warcraft, has been an inspiration for me ever since I first heard his scores. Since that day, I wanted to score for Blizzard cinematic. I have practiced a lot, bought music equipment for a lot of money etc. to get to where I am today. 

To practice even more, I started to download some trailers from apple.com/trailers. I re-scored some of them to get some experience. I also made some longer scores, just to get the feeling of composing longer cues. I have also scored some short movies. 

As for the Diablo 3 trailer I wanted to achieve the same feeling as in the original trailer. I started out with marking every places in the video when something changed. That was a hell of a job. Then I found all the instruments that I thought would fit into the environments that was shown in the picture, some middle-east sounds in my case. After that, I started out with the time signature, because when you have a movie with scenes that always changes, you may sometimes change this to get it in sync with the video. In some cases I needed to change it to 3/4 to 4/4, and for the last part it goes in 6/4. The same goes for changing the tempo to sync it up to the movie. When all that was done, I started out with the sequencing. I layered out the beautiful recordings from Tonehammer's Forgotten Voices: Francesca. They fitted just as I wanted them to fit. But the hard part was that I needed to make the melody out from the vocals, because I couldn't change the actual notes in the vocal . So I started out with some improvisation on my midi-keyboard, while the vocals were playing in the background. I did record it, and some places it sounded very good, but some places were horrible. I had to manually change the tone at the horrible places. So that's how I managed to get my melody to this score. 

Percussion was something I had in mind from the start. I knew exactly how I wanted it to be. So I picked out the drums/percussion from the great library -East West Stormdrum 2.  I pressed "record", then played the drums live from my midi-keyboard. In this way it will feels more human. By doing it this way, I don't get the looping feeling. I don't quantize it, I nearly never does that. I recorded every scene that way.

After everything is done, I go over each channel in the mixer to check the equalizer, compressor and volume. Sometimes I also double check the reverb or delay to hear that none of the instruments drown in the mix. 

So this is how I work. I will update this thread with some pictures etc. from my template.

Here is the score:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JglUS_J5KDc&fmt=22

Enjoy!

Ryan

My current work.

My current work is for a dance company called Jo Strømgren kompani. Jo Strømgren is the artistic director of JSK, founded 1998, he has developed a significant personal style with a mix of theatre, dance, puppets, film, and live music – wrapped in a nonsensical language frame.

As for me, I work in one of his best known choreographic pieces named "A dance Tribute to the Art of Football", that had premiere in 1997. It's now 10 years since last time it was on a tour. So this is very cool!

To read more about the kompani, check out the following link: http://jskompani.no/

Best

Ryan