The Dead Rising video game series is known for a number of things, including a fun-to-explore open world, a slightly goofier look at the zombie apocalypse than its sibling series, Resident Evil, and a really solid sound score.
Oleksa Lozowchuk is the man behind that score, at least for two of the three Dead Rising games. He’s the musical director for Capcom Vancouver, and has been responsible for composing large chunks of the music for Dead Rising 2 and 3 — he figures he wrote about 60 per cent of the latter's soundtrack — as well as finding people to write and record the rest of the music. (On Dead Rising 3, released the end of last year, that included 54-40’s Dave Genn, former Redd Kross drummer-turned-film score composer Brian Reitzell and industrial musician Celldweller.)
According to Lozowchuk, the most important part of making it onto a video game soundtrack, or at least one that he’s supervising, is to make sure it doesn’t sound like “video game music.”
“What I’m really interested in is people who are bringing something fresh or new to the table,” he says. “What often happens, particularly in games, is it becomes self-referential. People submit ‘video game music’ or ‘trailer-type music’ and it starts to sound really neutered and the same after a while…. Then every once in a while, you get artists who might not have any formal training, or particular background in music, but they have a really unique voice and they’ve done their 10,000 hours of whatever they do, and that really translates into the content I’m drawn to.”
Lozowchuk says the key to being both supervisor and composer is recognizing your own strengths and weaknesses, and then finding the right people to fill in those gaps.
“I get to align myself with either masters in that domain, or people who are really on the edge, up-and-coming, really gifted people.”
He finds this mix of masters and up-and-comers through a variety of channels. Lozowchuk was introduced to 54-40's Genn through a mutual friend, to Reitzel through his agent, and he discovered Celldweller by accident through a Capcom employee's iTunes playlist while Dead Rising 2 was still in development.
What initially started out as a licensing deal for Celldweller soon became a collaboration, as he and Lozowchuk co-wrote the end theme for Dead Rising 2, and Celldweller wound up writing music specifically for the score to Dead Rising 3.
Lozowchuk’s own path to working in video games was a circuitous one. He trained as a violin player as a child, quit in his teens to teach himself other instruments as well as produce music for friends. From there, he went to university for film and began working as a sound designer for film and television in Montreal.
“I came west about eight years ago, when the Vancouver Symphony asked me to do a piece of music for the Olympics,” he says. "I had a friend from high school who was working at a video game start-up called Blue Castle Games and he said, ‘Hey, do you want to come by for an audio position….’ I did the interview, took the job, flew my family out here and the rest was history.”
Blue Castle Games was eventually acquired by Capcom and rebranded Capcom Vancouver. Initially, Lozowchuk was just brought on to do sound design for the company's baseball series The Bigs, but moved onto music for Dead Rising. He says that his co-workers didn’t even know about his musical background before he took the job.
“I stepped up to the plate and ended up going on to produce and score Dead Rising 2, and then I just took over music altogether,” he says.
Lozowchuk says that work in video games appeals to him because it’s so collaborative. Video game music has to fit with both the overall mood and the pacing of the game. During the heat of production and post-production, Lozowchuk is on the floor every day, working with developer and test teams to make sure the music is matching up with the game play.
“In the world of Dead Rising, you might have certain boss battles or certain game play mechanics that have a particular cadence to it,” he says. “So I’ll have a build of the game and I’ll be throwing different music against it or writing to it, but then two or three weeks down the road, they might actually change the tempo and the cadence completely, so there’s a lot of iterations in that cycle. How they tweak and tune the game will affect if something that worked two or three weeks ago still works.”
Lozowchuk says that, more than anything, working as the musical director for Capcom has given him the ability to look at his own work in a larger context, and get a deeper understanding of the genre in which he’s working
“What’s cool about wearing both hats is that you can drill down in your own craft and really explore a very specific area of music,” he says. “So if it’s zombie games and it's horror, I can drill down and explore what is real horror. And if it’s an exploration of John Carpenter and that legacy of minimalist stuff, then that’s great. And then you can step back and see how that relates to modern trends or historical trends, or even non-musical trends.”
by Chris Dart via Electronic RSS
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