Alone in the Dark - CGEmpire 12th Music Competition

Hi all,

This was my entry to the CGEmpire Music competition run by Nikolas and with an animation by Ilias Sounas.

I have to say I absolutely adored scoring the animation even though I wasn't overly sure how to score the end. In the end I decided that the story was conveyed really well by the animation and therefore I didn't want the music to overpower the story. I wanted to understate the ending to make it more powerful.

Alone in the Dark You might want to download it as it is rather masive...

Personally, I really like my entry and it did get one other vote :p but yeah please critique and feedback and thanks again to Nikolas for organising the competition and Ilias for making such an awesome story and animation.

Chris

I will download it later... but from what I have heard, I love the music. Please tell us more! How did you stupble upon this project?

I can't hear anything from the file! The volume is too low. Is it possible you could also provide some sort of score for this?

EDIT: OOPS! Just found the volume for the player.

Still, without a score, I can't really say if it's REALLY good. It sounds great, as everything lines up with something in the clip, but I want so see how you did it.

Also, what sounds did you use for this?

Hi Alan,

Thanks for the review, erm, I don't really have a score at all I just wrote it all into Cubase as for the sounds, I used Reason for all hte synths and piano with some lovely reverb from a preset in Cubase. The orchestra was East West Gold and the choir: Magnus Choirs with some flanger's applied. Oops, and the recorder was from Ethnosphere, again, with some reverb applied.

To Pieter: it was quite well publicised on this forum on others but cgempire.com have a long-running composition competition with some pretty awesome prizes (Stormdrum 2!) and the audio section (and probably more :s) is run by Nikolas

Glad you liked the music,

Chris

Chris, I'm downloading your entry, although huge chances are I have it somewhere on my computer already!

In the meantime I wanted to say thanks for taking part and supporting the competition and CGEmpire...

Alan: It's rather rare to get to see scores in such animation shorts, at least for smaller calliber composers (such as myself for example).

Pieter: I organise music competitions with various prizes and themes. Each month, I advertise on several forums including this one. Even better visit CGEmpire and see for yourself! (gosh! Talk about SPAM huh? )

Chris, movie downloaded (at last): What I found about your entry, was that at some points it felt a bit too... "epic" if I may say that, which is not the style of the movie! The rendering and usage of Gold is quite good but it feels somewhat awkward in some places (like some trumpets sounding and then nothing, no lead). Harmonies work great and I did like the different chord progression, even if it gave a bit more somber and dark feeling to the score. (which is the name of your entry as well). I bet that if you pulled the trailer of the game "alone in the dark" your music would fit.

This is my harsh critisism based on my personal opinion, and nothing more, so you can dissagree and be right (or wrong...).

Have you seen my attempt? It was the most bizzare thing I did, although I didn't make it by the deadline so I didn't enter in the end.

Hey Nikolas,

Thanks for the reply, yeah I get why you said my entry was too epic, but I couldn't help writing epic music, at least for the beginning of the animation anyway; to justify it I wanted to show the epicness and futility of the little man's search for life. I think I did the death scene well though and I do like my motif (if you can call it that)

I'd agree with you about the trumpets, never really listened to it like that before.

Yeah I do remember your piece, it had some interesting harmonies. Tbh I prefered your score to The Egg, that was awesome