[DevDiary 10 - Music and Audio of Rome]

22 hours ago, Farflame said:

 

1. Is there some homage to Gladiator soundtrack composed by Hans Zimmer? Particularly track "Slave Who became a Gladiator" which starts as ethnic piece but evolved into tense rising music for coming into gladiator arena. Because there are few characters with gladiator background in Exp Rome so that homage could be interesting. 🙂
BTW if Hollywood would make Gladiator now Deianeira would be probably main star. 🙂

2. Can you tell us about main feeling or themes in different companion themes? What character traits your try to portray throughout music?

3. Female choir or voices are often used in historical movie soundtracks like Troy or Gladiator. Did you used them in Exp Rome?

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

[Blow Your Rome Trumpet: Expeditions: Rome Is Hosting a Music Contest]

Looking forward to hearing them!