Over the years, Cinemusical has been privileged to receive a lot of new music from the film and video game industry. It has been wonderful to see how many composer’s work has continued to flourish and grow. In the case of composer Winifred Philips, it has been an honor to hear her music for a number of video game projects over the years going back to when she was working on things like SimAnimals. Philips has been slowly carving out a name for herself in the field. Her essential book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music, should be required reading.
What has been more exciting though, is to watch the types of projects that she has been working on move from lighter to more serious gaming fare. Most impressive was her work on Assassin’s Creed: Liberation. The mix of ambient and ethnic musical sounds worked well there alongside her often sensitive thematic writing.
Her latest project, Call of Champions is a multi-player mobile gaming experience now available from Spacetime Studios. Philips has posted three selections from the score on her blog: https://winifredphillips.wordpress.com/2015/11/18/call-of-champions-2/. Her work on mobile games will be part of an upcoming presentation at the 2016 Game Developer’s Conference.
The theme has a great heroic idea with a bit of martial undercurrent. But what is most interesting is the harmonic shifts that occur within music that is at once recognizable for the genre but still unique musically. She ramps up the energy for “Battle Arena” which has a great sense of energy with electric guitar adding a modern flare to the music coupled with a thematic idea. The soaring string line works quite well against the sequencing percussion that drives things forward. As one would expect, while some of the gestures are perfectly in line with action music, it is the thematic writing that helps lift the music above the norm in this exciting action cue that would be perfectly at home in a big screen adventure. This is further explored with more rock styles appropriately in “Game Time”.
In these three musical excerpts from the Call of Champions score, one can hear both some of Philips’ thematic and harmonic writing that is always engaging, along with some contemporary rock ideas that are a perfect match for the game play. This is another great example of how Philips shapes her own style to help fit the project she is working on so well.
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