Tag Archives: Recurring Theme

Characters and Ideals: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation

Posted by Winifred Phillips on

Photograph of Grammy Award-winning video game composer Winifred Phillips at work in her music production studio.

By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow

Welcome!  I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and among my credits as a game composer, I was delighted to compose the original soundtrack for the bestselling video game Assassin’s Creed Liberation.  It was the first game from the popular Assassin’s Creed franchise to feature a female assassin.  Creating a musical support for her awesome adventure was an immense privilege for me.  In this series of articles, we’ve been exploring the composition process that I pursued for Assassin’s Creed Liberation, including how I used music to support the narrative by defining locations, reflecting cultural and historical influences, and emphasizing important ideas.  If you’d like to catch up on the previous four articles, you can find them here:

  1. Cultural Fusion: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation
  2. Time and Place: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation
  3. Melodies as Symbols: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation
  4. The Symbolism of Recurrence: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation

Through initial theme and subsequent variation, music can carry ideas forward while keeping those concepts fresh as they undergo repetition.  The theme and variation technique allows us as composers to create structure and unify a musical score, and this effect can operate with multiple themes.  Together, these themes can form a sense of overall identity for a video game.

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Importance of Contrast (The Game Music of Jurassic World Primal Ops: GDC 2023)

Posted by Winifred Phillips on

Video game composer Winifred Phillips is pictured here working in her music production studio. This image is included in an article about the music of the video game Jurassic World Primal Ops.

By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow

Hello there! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips.  In March of 2023, I gave a lecture entitled “Chaos Theory: The Music of Jurassic World Primal Ops” during the Game Developers Conference 2023.  This lecture was named one of the most popular presentations at GDC 2023, and is currently nominated for a Game Audio Network Guild Award for Best Game Audio Presentation.  Every year, after I present at this popular yearly conference, I release the complete content of my lecture in a series of free articles.  This is the sixth and final article in the series based on my GDC 2023 presentation.  As before, I’m including all the substance from my GDC presentation in this article series, along with all of the videos and sound files, and many of the illustrations that I used during my GDC talk.

During these articles I’ve been sharing my process composing the musical score for Jurassic World Primal Ops – it’s the video game from Universal Games and Behaviour Interactive. Jurassic World Primal Ops came out in the summer of 2022, right alongside the theatrical run of the latest film in this famous franchise: Jurassic World Dominion. 

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