Making Halo 4: Composing Worlds

Making Halo 4: Composing Worlds is a video documentary by 343 Industries, introducing the music composer of Halo 4, Neil Davidge. It was released on Halo Waypoint and YouTube on 11 April 2012.

Transcript

• Matt Dunkley: "We wanted to have a cinematic approach to the music, to give it that scale, and those production value... but it's like doing 20 movies. (laughs)"
• Marco Migliari: "There's always something that's moving along emotionally. It's never like, treading water. It's never static."
• "It's very different, so it requires this complete different mindset. "
• Andrew Morgan: "Take the things we love about the Halo scores that had come before, try to put that into it, but then also try to add in the things that really excite us, so it creates something that's really honest."
• Neil Davidge: "As intimidating itis to follow Marty's scoreS. I think I can bring something fresh to the game."

MAKING HALO 4: COMPOSING WORLDS

• Neil Davidge: "I want that to be a journey. A … journey. An emotional journey. And I think that's the part the music plays. "
• Marco Migliari: "He's an extremely competent, and confident composer. He's got a real extinctive knack for knowing what sounds right, and he knows how to get there."
• Andrew Morgan: "Neil's a fan of Halo, and he's making something he's very excited about, for Halo.
• Matt Dunkley: "I know that's why Neil's attracted to do it, because they very much talked about they talked about they wanted the integrity in the music as high as the integrity is going to be in the design of the game."
• Ken Kato: "He's a big fan of the franchise and he's played all of our games from the beginning."
• Neil Davidge: "I've been playing the game since 2001, and there's this mysterious guy behind the green suit of armor, being intrigued to us what he feels."
• Andrew Morgan: "We were fortunate enough to inherit the expectation that the score would be lyrical, that it would be emotional, that the music would matter."
• Geoff Foster: "It gets in here, and you can't stop humming it, you can't stop thinking it."
• Darrell Alexander: "The melding of the classical with the unexpected that Neil brings, that makes for excitement."
• Ken Kato: "It has a lot of straight cred within the industry."
• Matt Dunkley: "You know, wiith his work with Massive Attack and stuff, he was absolutely at the cutting edge of sounds, and beats, and electronic textures, and how he manipulates sound."
• Marco Migliari: "He uses that initial performance as a starting point."
• Andrew Morgan: "Maybe we can record this twice as fast so we can slow it all down and pitch it down, and it'll be live orchestra, at Abbey Road, best conditions you can imagine, but we we're gonna subvert it a little bit: We're gonna play it backwards, or play it an octave down, or run it through through guitar amplifiers or things like that."
• Sotaro Tojima: "We needed a music composer who can bring a mixture of textural and organic."
• Neil Davidge: "I'm choosing the sounds very carefully and I'm processing the sounds as I'm writing."
• Dessi Stefanova: "Listening to everything that we had as examples of what was already recorded, everything was treated differently."
• Kazuma Jinnouchi: "It's important to go for something that's never been done."
• Andrew Morgan: "Here's the obvious answer: Okay, but there's something better we can do, something more original we can do."
• Darrell Alexander: "We're very aware of the legacy of the Halo sound, and we're very keen to respect it."
• Andrew Morgan: "As Halo fans, we hope that other Halo fans will say 'Oh, man. Yeah, that's cool, I like it'."
• Neil Davidge: "It's not a revolution, it's an evolution, of the past Halo scores."

The Halo 4 logo is shown.

HOLIDAY 2012