Well, time for another larger blog update. As I mentioned previously I tend to just sum up a few highlights / milestones on this blog now so if you want more regular updates as they’re released I’m on twitter and also have a shiny new(ish) facebook page.

 

Firstly, way back in April I wrote an original song for the animated series ‘Midnight Twilight’ with frequent collaborator and Animal Crossing enthusiast Amanda Lee. This was my first track where I wrote the music, lyrics, and also mixed it – so it was quite a challenge but fun at the same time.

I played around with a few mixing techniques, mainly lots of delay and automated reverb to give it a really ethereal and breathy sound. The animation is also set in a post apocalyptic sci-fi world, so there are electronic elements, little bits of radio interference, and sudden stops and starts to reflect the slightly worn down and ‘broken machine’ – see what I did there? :-)

Next up, I’m writing music for a card game. WHAT? MUSIC FOR A CARD GAME?

The jovial undead bunch at ‘a Jolly Corpse‘ are making their first card game and setup a kickstarter to get funding for the project. As a little promotional boost we are also producing an original soundtrack based on the game’s lore that people can stick on as they’re playing or just listen to it as an album in its own right.

The video above features a draft version of the Domain ‘Main Theme’  playing in the background as well as Jesse and Beau using their hypnotic marketing skills to convince you to pledge towards the project.

Also on the subject of ‘a Jolly Corpse’ – Wyv and Keep is finally out!

The full, unabashed, real-deal, final, version was released on June 14th marking around two years development time for me but the jolly corpse devs had been working on it for much much longer.

So there were many sighs of relief let out on that day, phew.

You can buy the full version from the Jolly Corpse site where you’ll also get a Desura key (and Steam key once the game is greenlit).

We’re also planning on releasing the game on Xbox as soon as the online coding is up to scratch as well as as many other platforms as possible.

I’ve also been doing some sound design for  a few projects, the first being Rival Threads which is having a preview / demo release on July 5th which gives people a little taster of what the game involves. So this demo has provided a good opportunity for me to concept a few more difficult sounds and what’s even better is we can gather feedback from people after it’s released to make the final game release play (and sound) even better.

Aaaand finally – I helped with sound for a promotional trailer for the upcoming Emirati animated series ‘Torkaizer‘. I’ll actually be composing the music for the finished episode, however in the trailer below the music was just offcuts of some typical ACTION TRAILER sounding music.

I did provide the dialogue editing (which was somewhat fun as I don’t speak a word of Arabic) and also the sound effects editing / final mix. This trailer was kind of a turning point for me as I realised just how fun and varied sound design / editing can be as it requires a huge range of disciplines to get the job done.

The trailer actually gathered quite a bit of worldwide coverage, primarily as this animated series will be one of the first original animes in Arabic. It was featured on IGN Middle East and also the Japanese tv show  ‘WOWOW’ (brilliant name). So I can’t wait to put pen to paper (well… hand to keyboard) for this and start writing some cool mecha inspired music.

So that just about sums up the past few months, and man has it been hectic. But in the good / exciting way. University has finished for a few months so it will be quite nice to focus all my attention on music / sound freelancing for the next few months.