Entropy - Aaron Weatherford - Deneer Death Experience

How I Make Music

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Deneer Death Experience. It's an action cue from the sci fi audio drama Entropy, which tells the story of a group of people working to find a new habitable planet. I would describe this cue as an action cue that kind of dips and turns, slows down speeds up. You're listening to How I Make Music, where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. My name is Aaron Weatherford. I'm a composer from Summerville, South Carolina. And this is How I Make Music.

IN THIS EPISODE

1:21 About Entropy

The name of this audio drama is Entropy. And it's about a group of people trying to find a new habitable planet. Within that, there is a little bit of conflict between colonies. My favorite character is actually the villain Deneer. His full name is Pron Deneer. The name of the piece that we're going to be breaking down today is called Deneer Death Experience. Very funny. Nobody dies. It's okay. Everything's fine. You'll just have to watch the audio drama ... listen to the audio drama in order to find out what happens.

2:17 Influences

One of my main influences is Michael Giacchino. He did Ratatouille and a lot of Pixar movies. The Incredibles, Star Trek scores. And what I really like about him is his sense of storytelling. It's really really cool and the fact that he manages to be both old school and new school at the same time, fresh and new. John Williams style orchestrations, like very golden era silver era mixed with stuff like synths.

3:09 Context of the piece

The context of this piece is during when the main character Jan is in the middle of having a conversation with her mother. And it gets very rudely interrupted when the ship blows up, and there's a hole in the ship and they almost fly out and die. And then this whole battle ensues, then Deneer comes in and gives this speech. And then Jan and a couple of other crew members have to escape. Really slow and kind of menacing and has a little bit of kind of these weird orchestrations that can tell you what type of guy Pron Deneer is. Here's what his theme sounds like. More of a motif than a theme because of the fact that it's only a few notes and it's so short, you know.

4:54 Off the tempo grid

So the escape stuff, the escape juice, all of a sudden are these kind of magic. Measured trems that start going. And it gets faster and faster and faster. And it builds up and builds up and then stops. That's when the piece finally ends. There's a part in there in the piece where the tempo starts to ramp up here, take a listen. You don't really hear this sound of tempo ramps often in modern film scores. I feel it kind of adds motion and emotion. And it kind of needed that ramp. It's one of those moments where it's like, here goes nothing, and then they blast off. For me, everything is about story and emotion. And a lot of stuff stays the same tempo for a really long time. And it kind of gets it kind of gets boring after a while. Alexander Desplat brings this up a lot, the fact that we're really attached to the grid and we don't like to get away from it. Sometimes I don't do a metronome at all, I just play and whatever happens happens.

6:44 Mother Knows Best

So there's actually another piece in the audio drama Entropy called Mother Knows Best. And it's actually the talk that happens right before the battle scene that consists of Deneer Death Experience. And it's just really slow, no tempo, just piano. And it has this little like pad synth under it. And really, that's just those two things. And that kind of made up this little. This motif that I come up with for the relationship between Jan and her mother, they're obviously very close.

7:43 Slap bass orchestration

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