By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Hey everyone! I'm videogame composer Winifred Phillips. GDC 2021 is coming this July 19th to the 23rd, and I'm excited that I'll be giving a talk during this year's conference! My talk is called, "From Spyder to Sackboy: A Big Adventure in Interactive Music," and I'll be sharing more details about my talk as the conference gets nearer. Once again, GDC will be a fully virtual game industry event this year. I think all of us who have participated in GDC's awesome online events over the past year have really enjoyed the experience. Considering the long list of structural and logistical changes that had to be made, it's amazing how smoothly everything went! Over this difficult year, these virtual GDC events have nurtured a sense of community, offered lots of great content, and helped us all feel a little less isolated. In addition to the virtual Game Developers Conference main event, GDC also offered a special GDC Summer conference in August, and this is when they first introduced the live Ask-Me-Anything sessions that will be making a return during the upcoming GDC 2021 conference. I got the chance to jump into one of these Ask-Me-Anything sessions last year, and it occurs to me that folks who never got a chance to attend that GDC Summer event might like to get a taste of what one of these Ask-Me-Anything sessions were like. With that in mind, I thought it might be helpful to post a partial transcript of my session here. What follows are some edited extracts from my full Ask-Me-Anything Q&A. The session was hosted and expertly moderated by journalist Alissa McAloon (pictured below) of the popular Gamasutra site, who fielded questions from the audience members participating in chat. So here are the transcript highlights from our session!
Alissa McAloon: Our speaker today is the prolific game composer Winifred Phillips. You might recognize her work from franchises like Assassin’s Creed, God of War, LittleBigPlanet, Total War, and The Sims. So, I guess we’ll just jump right into it here and then we’ll pull some questions from chat. How does game composition differ from other areas of music composition?
Winifred Phillips: Game composition is a different philosophy. The game engine has to essentially be able to take the music apart and put it back together in different ways. That’s really interesting, because as a video game composer it means I’m not thinking about beginnings and middles and ends. I’m thinking about states of being, of activity, of thought, of action… of ways to feel at any particular moment. You express that musically, and then you create a whole assortment of those kinds of musical statements that can be then assembled into its own vocabulary. A kind of peculiar grammar.
McAloon: Whole complicated beast, because with most narrative, you have that beginning, and middle and end… and that’s your safety blanket. But not having that in music seems a little intimidating.
Phillips: It’s true. When I first started, it was hard to get your head around – the idea of creating music that seems interesting and involved and has a lot to say, and yet isn’t giving you signposts that are pointing towards the direction that you’re heading. Because when you create big set-piece moments within a musical composition, then it really draws attention to itself. Especially if the music was designed to loop. 
Then you can feel the repetition happening, and that’s a big issue to deal with structurally. You want to make sure that the music feels natural, as if it were being created specifically for the gamer’s experience. You don’t want to give away the magic trick that’s going on underneath. You have to keep in mind the unique nature of video game music when you’re creating it, so it functions well within the construct of gaming itself.
McAloon: From chat, we have a question: have you ever had to make music for a game without seeing what it looks like? If so, what is that process like?
Phillips: Yeah, yeah, that actually happens quite a lot! More than you’d think. And I think it has a lot to do with the way in which game development happens. If you’re creating music for a film, you tend to be brought in when the film is somewhere near its final cut. You’re not creating music for the film while it’s being shot, or while it’s in preliminary edits. The composer needs to know what the final beats are – how the shots are going to go. But games tends to be in development when I’m brought in, and sometimes there isn’t anything playable yet. Or if there is, its early character designs, with the arms jutting straight out, 
and just floating over an abstract-looking geometrical grid. It gives me no idea of what the game is going to look like or feel like. And you have to be able to cope with that… kind of plumb the depths of your own imagination to kind of fill in those gaps. Research really does help a lot, because we have to bring our own inner life to the envisioning of what it is we’re scoring, when we don’t have those kinds of visual helpers to guide us along.
McAloon: So, in the same vein, Christian in chat wants to know: how do you ensure that sound effects and music mesh together really well and form a consistent experience? As opposed to a random mix that doesn’t jell quite well?
Phillips: Yeah, that’s a great question, Christian! I think the best way to go about that is to have a really nice working relationship between the composer and the sound designer, the sound team, the audio director. We’re all on the same page, and we’re working together, and sometimes it’s trial and error. The sound design team may not actually know what the sound effects are going to be doing when they ask me to compose the music. I might be ahead of them in terms of the workflow… For instance, I deliver music for them, and then they experiment with the sound design. They come 
back to me, and they ask me to tweak things – if they’re not fitting together properly with the sound design decisions that are being made for the game. Or on the other hand, sometimes the sound designers have just gone ahead and changed what they were doing to fit the music that I was delivering. I think it depends on priorities. With such a collaborative process, it’s very fluid, and it’s about personalities and artistic ambitions. Everybody’s trying hard to make sure all the elements come together. It’s a conglomeration of so many different creative strategies. So many different viewpoints coming together.
McAloon: Just to expand on all that, how long is your typical involvement in a project? How long are you working alongside those developers?
Phillips: It’s hard to answer. It depends on the project. I mean, I’ve been on indie teams with short development schedules, and I’m in there hitting the ground running. Just cranking out the tracks. In a month or so, I’ve completed all the work for it. And on the other end of the spectrum, I’ve been in projects that have had me working on and off for years. They’ll come to me, and ask me to deliver a cache of tracks for them to incorporate. Then they’ll go off, and they’ll work on the project, and it will be very fluid. And they’ll come back to me later and say things like, ‘the game is completely different now so we need you to revise the music,’ or ‘we’re thinking about a different style.’ The interactive implementation scheme may have changed. There are a lot of different pitfalls to it, but also some really great things can come out it.
McAloon: Another question from chat here, from Brian – on thematic development. Any suggestions on incorporating recognizable themes into content without getting samey or redundant through overuse?
Phillips: Good question, yeah. Themes are tricky in videogames. Particularly with looping content that’s going to be repeated a lot. You can play a game for hundreds of hours, and there are only a few games that are actually requisitioning hundreds of hours of music. So there’s going to be repetition happening. I like to break themes down. State them in a very recognizable and dynamic way when it’s an important, 
set-piece moment in the game, and you want to create a musical signature for the project. But then you can break it down into fragments. Motives, small segments, just a few notes… something that might not be consciously recognized as a part of that theme. Then you can sprinkle it elsewhere and it just communicates in a subconscious way to the player. It asserts the game’s musical identity without really being overt about it. And you can also use them as figures. Ostinatos. You can restructure a theme to be an underlying pattern, with other original material on top. That’s a way to also assert the theme, without it being a foreground element. It’s not front-of-consciousness, but it's still there, asserting an identity. I think that’s always a great thing to try to strive for – to sprinkle a sense of identity into everything you’re doing.
McAloon: Building that into a question from Tim – what is your process to avoid over-composing a section or scene in a game? Can you share examples of how you’ve done that in the past?
Phillips: Good point. It’s a fine line. You don’t want to do too little; you don’t want to do too much. For Assassin’s Creed Liberation, I used a four-chord 
pattern. Very subtle. But it was the central building block of the main theme of the game: this four chord pattern that repeated over and over again. And I was able to use that in the game a lot. It was very subtle, very low-keyed, almost subliminal in the sense that you could recognize it when it came back, but it wasn’t anything that would arrest your attention. It was a stealthy construct that I could use to create a sense of identity without having to overwrite the piece.
McAloon: To branch into some more day-to-day operations, we’ve got a couple of questions I’m going to fuse together. The first one is from Dan Cooper in chat. Wants to know if you have any recommendations for effective time management strategies when you’re composing or preparing to compose for a game?
Phillips: Nice! Yeah. The first thing I do is make sure that I’m well aware of when the deadlines are, and how much material I’m going to need to prepare in order to meet them. You can look at your own speed, in terms of how many minutes of music you create a day, and then figure out what your working schedule and your workflow should 
be like in order to meet those deadlines. Everybody is going to have a different workflow – a different comfortable output per day. That is going to be an important consideration when you figure out how you’re going to schedule yourself, how much time you’re going to need to devote to different tasks each day. It’s a really personal choice, too, because we’re all very different in the way we approach music composition. I wouldn’t want to say there’s a one-size-fits-all solution. But as long as you’re taking those deadlines seriously, and asking yourself what you need to do to get those deadlines handled, I think you’ll be okay.
McAloon: So, for people looking to get into composing music, we have a question here from Mallory, who wants to know how does an aspiring composer work their way up? And then we also have another question asking about networking as a composer?
Phillips: I think it’s important to try to network. Of course, in-person conferences were helpful for doing meetings, but if you can set up online meetings, that could be helpful. Just get involved in the community. Even writing articles about what you’ve learned from 
past projects and offering them up to the game audio community can increase your presence. It does matter if people know you’re there. And if you’ve had experiences working with student teams and or small indie projects, and you feel like you can share what you’ve learned, that can make people aware of who you are and what your skills are. If you’re a student and you can get
