Hi Farflame,
I missed these yesterday but such great questions I wanted to answer.
Gladiator is such an amazing film and a legendary score so I stayed well away from it, we wanted something really unique for this so I took my inspiration from the amazing colours in the game, the characters and then did a lot of research on ancient music of the time as well as the instruments they had back then.
The Character themes were such a huge part of writing the score, luckily theres such solid foundations in there that it made my job a lot easier trying to get a handle of who they were. We touched on it yesterday but I tired to hone in on specific parts of there characters so Cleopatra was very sultry and confident, and Lucullus is such a good man it was really important his theme reflected that.
Regarding voices we sure did, we used them in a couple of diferent ways, we had Empara Mi a great singer with a haunting voice perform on the score for a lot of the more poingnat moments and then on the flip side we used a full choir on some of the combat pieces for the big impact moments and give it gravitas!
Thanks so much for your questions, and if you fancy doing a cover of one of the themes (or know someone that would) THQ are running a cool competition on there page here , where you can win $1000 - https://tc.thqnordic.com/expeditions-rome-music-contest
All the best
Thomas Farnon
