John Debney is an Oscar-nominated film composer with so many diverse credits to his name I don’t even want to throw any titles out there as if they are representative of his work. Suffice to say he's composed for all sorts of media, from TV and feature films to animation, and has just finished his first ever game score for Sony’s forthcoming Lair.
Debney gave an Audio Keynote address on “Music in Games” that dealt mainly with the differences between composing for media like film and TV versus composing for games. He broke his thoughts up into the “creative side” and the “business side” of composing. Overall, he kept stressing that game composing has “a very rosy future” ahead.
As a film composer, Debney says he used to have five to eight weeks to score a film. But in recent years, this has changed: “Ever-shrinking budgets and often-times impossible time constraints” now frequently stand in the way of creativity, he says. “Hollywood can and has become stale.” Other media, like video games, are encroaching on the big movie studios’ bottom line, and they have responded by churning out “safe” material that has a built-in audience. It’s no wonder why even a big-time mainstream composer like Debney is seeking new art forms to work in.
“Game music is like a puzzle that must be thought out much more carefully,” Debney says. Game composers, who are typically paid per-minute of music, watch as their pieces are played over and over again, and sometimes cut and pasted into other pieces, a process that is both “scary and exciting” to Debney. The drawn out production schedules of most games, however, allow him to compose a piece, leave it for a while, and come back to it with a fresh pair of ears, allowing a lot of room to get really creative. Adjusting to a longer timeframe was the biggest change for him, though he sees parallels between animation and games in how they come together step by step. But Debney strongly encouraged all composers to embrace the opportunities afforded by the long-term production schedules of games.
As proof that the game industry “gets it” and is heading in the right direction creatively, Debney cited the fact that game scores are often performed live onstage, whereas he himself has been pushing the film industry to stage performances of film scores for a long time, to no avail. Live shows can reach a broader audience than a film or a game, and “cross-pollination” of ideas is something Debney sees as vital to creativity.
One thing the industry doesn’t “get,” though, is how to pay composers. When it comes to the business side of game composing, Debney very plainly stated that the per-minute-of-music rate that most game composers get for their scores needs to change in order to continue bringing top talent into the game industry. Landing a hit TV series is money in the bank for a media composer, while film composers make their money off of showings in foreign markets, because in both cases royalty checks from ASCAP or BMI come rolling in with regularity. Not to mention composers are paid an up-front “creative fee” for scoring the media. Not only is a new pay scale necessary to attract talented composers to the game industry, but it is also “morally and ethically right.”
Despite the short-sightedness of the pay scale, Debney really couldn’t stress his optimism about game composing enough: “Some of the most recognizable and iconic themes may soon come from games. Some are already doing that. I see a bright future for composers in all media, especially video games.”
