The Sweet Life: An Interview with Winifred Phillips
Written by Jonathan Shearon
August 25, 2005
Writing the score for a big budget movie tie-in is a challenge for any composer. Add to that a companion film score by Danny Elfman and final approval by director Tim Burton, and you’ve got one daunting assignment. For Winifred Phillips, a young composer whose score for the game God of War has already won her some notice, the task was one she took in stride. We recently got the chance to speak with her about her role in the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory video game.
Music on Film: You’ve received quite a bit of acclaim right out of the gate for your score from God of War. How did you get involved in writing music for video games?
Winifred Phillips: Sony Computer Entertainment America asked me to contribute music to the God of War video game, developed by David Jaffe. I’d originally made contact with SCEA’s music supervisor, Victor Rodriguez. Victor and I exchanged e-mails and talked on the phone. This was in April of 2004. I e-mailed Victor some MP3s of my music, and then later I sent him a CD demo. After that, Victor and I agreed to meet in Los Angeles during E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, in May of that year. We had a great meeting at the convention. Victor and I walked over to the Sony booth on the exhibit floor, and he showed me the display for “God of War”. I got a chance to see the game in action, while Victor talked about the musical approach for the game. After the convention I wrote a couple of demo tracks to show that I understood how Victor wanted the game to sound, and then he hired me to contribute music to the project. Strangely enough, during that very same convention I also met with the developer for my second game project, and we talked in general terms about the music needs of one of their upcoming titles, which turned out to be the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory console game. So I’d have to say that E3 2004 launched my career as a video game composer.
MoF: Could you tell us a little about your involvement with Radio Tales and NPR?
WP: My first job as a professional composer was writing the musical score for the Radio Tales series for National Public Radio. At that time, NPR’s cultural programming department offered a showcase series called “NPR Playhouse”, which was the public radio equivalent of TV’s “Masterpiece Theater”, and was the home of the Radio Tales series on NPR. I wrote over fifty hours of music for the Radio Tales series. Radio Tales consisted of adaptations of classic stories from world literature, dramatized with wall-to-wall music to immerse listeners in the experience. In that way, it was as much a music series as it was a drama series. I consider myself very lucky to have had the opportunity to work on Radio Tales, it was a real boot camp for a media composer. I got the chance to create music for wonderful stories like “War of the Worlds”, “Homer’s Odyssey”, “Arabian Night”, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, and many others. I had a great time, and it was a terrific experience.
MoF: Were you a fan of Ronald Dahl’s story or the 1971 film prior to writing the Charlie score?
WP: I’d read Ronald Dahl’s book as a child, and loved it thoroughly. The book made a huge impression on me, as it did on so many children. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was one of the few children’s books that wasn’t afraid to explore dark territories. It didn’t condescend to its audience. Ironically, while focusing on sweets, the book purposefully avoided sugarcoating the hard truths about life. At the beginning of the book, Charlie’s life in poverty is extremely harsh. He wins the ticket to visit the fantastic factory of Mr. Willy Wonka, but his adventures in that magical wonderland are tempered by the constant presence of danger. Wonka’s factory is like a beautiful forest full of unseen predators. Selfishness on the part of the other prize-winning children is met with quick punishment, doled out not by any particular character but by the factory itself. On the surface, the book is a morality tale wrapped up in the trappings of a fantasy story. Underneath, it has all the complexities and symbolism of mythology, coupled with an unforgiving satirical look at contemporary culture. As a work of literature, the book has something to offer readers of any age.
I hadn’t seen the 1971 film prior to being brought on to score the new console game version, but I made a point of watching the older film before I began work on the score. While Gene Wilder’s performance as Willy Wonka is inimitable, and the movie is charming, it is not very faithful to the book. The story is presented with only a small portion of the darker subtext found in the original prose. Since Tim Burton’s version was meant to be a more direct adaption of Dahl’s work, the cinematic approach would naturally be much more ominous and eccentric. I enjoyed the 1971 version on the level that it was meant to be enjoyed, but I was very eager to see what Tim Burton would do with such rich source material.
MoF: With so much other music related to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the song-track from the Gene Wilder film and Danny Elfman’s contemporaneous score), what did you do to try and create your own voice within the story?
WP: I didn’t need to worry about being influenced by the Danny Elfman score, because I never got the chance to hear it while I was working. I completed the music for the game long before I ever heard anything from Danny Elfman’s film score. As far as the music from the 1971 film is concerned, its musical approach was not in any way appropriate for a Tim Burton project, so I was never concerned about differentiating my score from the musical approach in that film. Truthfully, I’ve never really been worried about creating my own musical voice for any project in which I’ve been involved. I’ve always let the source material guide my efforts. If I was true enough to the spirit of the story, then the music would be an honest musical expression of it. If I had done my job right, then the music would be an echo of the overall ‘voice’ of the project. That was what I was trying to do with my score for the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory console game.
MoF: What sort of instruction did you get from director Tim Burton.
WP: Actually, all my instructions came from the developer, High Voltage, who relayed Warner Brother’s wishes to me. I was given very general directions, which were to keep to an orchestral approach, and touch upon the quirkiness of the environments. I didn’t have any direct contact with Tim Burton, but he did listen to the music I wrote for the game, and gave his approval for all of it without asking for any changes. I was very gratified to know my work had met with his approval.
MoF: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory features a lovely main theme that’s interwoven throughout the score. Do you begin the composing process by mapping out themes and leitmotifs first, or are your scores through-composed from track to track.
WP: While writing music for this project, I was given assignments, each of which focused on the musical needs of one particular area of the game. During the development of the game, levels were redesigned and the order in which areas were encountered by the player was shifted and rearranged as development progressed. Because the overall shape of the game kept changing while I worked, it was impossible for me to plan the overall “shape” of the score, and this made it hard to create recurring themes. I knew, however, that it was important to do so for this project. In his writing style, Ronald Dahl conveyed an enormous affection for his main character and the wondrous world in which he found himself. I wanted to make sure the music did the same thing, which demanded a thematic approach.
To create a thematic score for this project was a challenge, given the logistical issues. I decided from the beginning to look for any and all opportunities to establish meaningful themes for characters and situations. This required me to create subtle leitmotifs everywhere in the score, even during gameplay situations which involved no character building elements or story-driven action. As a result, the score includes themes that are associated both with locations and with characters. To give you an example, Willy Wonka’s theme in the game is also the theme for the Chocolate Room, which creates a subliminal association between the man and the most magical room of his factory. There are several themes that are associated not with characters or situations, but with general emotions. The main theme of the game is also the ‘hope’ theme that recurs many times, particularly in ‘wonder and awe’ moments inside the factory. The ‘danger’ theme which underscores threats or action sequences is also associated strongly with the naughty children, who each express it using their own unique solo instrument. One of the first themes to appear in the game is the plaintive melody that expresses Charlie’s longing, which thereafter is used as Charlie’s theme. This short melody is perhaps the most recurring leitmotif in the game. In writing music under conditions which made creating themes difficult, I ended up composing a very thematic score, with lots of melodic threads woven together.
MoF: Many times when composers use synthesizers and computers as “virtual orchestras” they sound … well … virtual, but I thought you managed to get an astoundingly acoustic sound in the Charlie score. Is that something you consciously try to avoid when composing music that will ultimately be produced electronically, or is it better to just embrace the quirks of electronic music and make them a part of the score?
WP: The direction I was given by Warner Brothers for this score was to create an orchestral sound from my own studio, so there was never any question of the approach I’d be using. Sampling technology allows for a technically savvy composer to emulate the sound of an orchestra convincingly, but to do so you must first acquire an intimate familiarity with the way an orchestra is meant to sound. Then you take that knowledge and apply it to the technology. I enjoy the challenges of orchestral simulation, and I find the sound palette of the orchestra to be very inspiring. I’ve worked on other projects that allowed me to explore the possibilities of purely synthetic sounds as well. One of the advantages of music technology today is the ability to bring these elements together and experiment with them during the process of music creation, which was impossible before the advent of digital audio workstations and sophisticated software samplers. The ability to merge acoustic and electric sounds into new combinations can be very inspiring, but in the end, when you strip away all the bells and whistles, all that you have left is the musical idea with which you started. When you’re creating music, you must have a worthwhile musical idea, regardless of the tools you use to express it.
MoF: There’s quite a lot of choral work in this score. Why did you choose that style of music for this particular story?
WP: I concentrated on a women’s choir for this project, because I think a women’s choir is very good at conveying a sense of magic and wonder when used as part of an orchestral arrangement. Sometimes I used the choir on open vowel chords, and other times I wrote them in unison carrying the theme. At times I also had the choir singing nonsense syllables in fast passages meant to convey childlike excitement. I enjoyed creating those tracks. I also enjoyed performing the vocals for the chorus, I overdubbed my own voice twelve to sixteen times to create the choral sound. I worked with award-winning music producer Winnie Waldron, who oversaw the vocal sessions and ensured that the quality of the music remained at its highest level throughout the music production process. The choral sessions were very demanding and difficult, but also very enjoyable to record. Charlie’s journey through the factory put him in a lot of humorous situations. Having a choir jump in and start scatting in counterpoint was a great way to support the humor. Writing those tracks allowed me to experiment with different vocal techniques. They also allowed me to just cut loose and have fun musically.
MoF: What kinds of special challenges do more linear story-driven games like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory pose for the composer?
WP: The Charlie and the Chocolate Factory console game relied on its cinemas to propel the story portions of the game. Scoring the cinemas was very much like scoring any piece of film. The challenge came in the fact that the cinemas were completed after most of the game was finished, and were the last part of the game to be scored. This meant that for most of the development process, I was composing music for the gameplay elements only. I was writing music for sections of the game in which Charlie explored the factory, solved puzzles, interacted with Oompa Loompas, etc. The game had very little story at this point, and I had to keep in mind that there would be lots of story in the final game, when the cinemas were incorporated. Anticipating this, I tried to write themes and arrangements for the gameplay sections which would weave well into the cinemas later, and tie the two parts of the game together. When I finally got to score the cinemas, I had already built up a library of themes from the gameplay sections, so I had a lot of melodies and techniques with which to work. It made the cinemas a lot of fun to score.
MoF: Up to this point, you’ve composed for diverse mediums like radio and video games – would you like to compose for films at some point?
WP: Absolutely. Creating music for films would be an amazing opportunity. Films, like video games, are vehicles for the ancient art of storytelling, using the visual language of the medium to convey the drama. I believe that the art of underscore is basically the art of telling a story using the universal language of music. When you look at it that way, the underscore composer is essentially an interpreter, translating one language into another. I’m eager to be involved in any medium where stories are being told.
MoF: In an age when women have become a part of almost every other element of media production, why do you think there are still so few female composers for films and video games?
WP: It’s true that in video games there are almost no female composers at all, and in films there are only a small handful of names that film aficionados might recognize. If there is a specific reason why this is true, I couldn’t even begin to guess what it is. Female songwriters and composers have made their mark in the music industry, so it could not be said that there is any lack of talent or expertise in our gender. Yet, female composers are still for the most part shut out of the underscore field. While the current state of affairs makes things more difficult for the female composer, it by no means makes success an impossibility. Women who have found success in this field have done so by steadfastly refusing to be deterred from their goal. In order to survive in this industry, the female underscore composer must be fiercely determined to succeed.
MoF: Can you tell us about any of your upcoming projects?
WP: I have several projects in very early stages right now, so I’m not at liberty to discuss them. I’ve been enjoying my work in the video game industry very much, and I’m looking forward to creating more game music in the future.
...When you’re creating music, you must have a worthwhile musical idea, regardless of the tools you use to express it....