Game Music Spotlight: Defiance Composer Bear McCreary

The composer for TV shows Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead,  and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is at the helm for the music of the Defiance show and game. McCreary shares his thoughts on game scoring in our exclusive interview.

Anyone who is a fan of speculative fiction television has probably had the opportunity to enjoy Bear McCreary’s innovative and evocative scoring. His background includes both game and television music, so it’s a great fit to have him crafting music for the upcoming Defiance project, which will roll out in both formats. 

Earlier this week, we offered a glimpse at the game through our interview with producer Rob Hill, and more about the show through our conversation with visual effects supervisor Gary Hutzel. Today we shine the spotlight on Bear McCreary, both to learn more about his upcoming Defiance score, and his background working on other fan-favorite projects. 

Game Informer: Tell me a little bit about your role on Defiance. 

McCreary: Well, I am composing the musical underscore for the game as well as the musical underscore for the series, and also crafting a number of themes and other stylistic bridges that will connect the world of the show with the world of the game so that viewers and gamers will have the feeling that they’re in the same universe. And that’s something that music can really help with on a powerful, subconscious level.

I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about your background in music and composition, in working in science fiction, and in working in soundtrack work. 

I’ll try to tell you a little [laughs]. There’s a lot to cover. I have always loved science fiction, and I’ve always loved movie music. And so, of course science fiction music was always something that I was really excited about, even as a kid. 

I came down here to Los Angeles to go to school to study film scoring at the University of Southern California, and I worked very closely with Elmer Bernstein, one of the most famous film composers of all time. His sci-fi cred includes movies like Ghostbusters and Heavy Metal, so it was really a dream come true working for him. Shortly thereafter I began working for a composer named Richard Gibbs, and that led to me being the composer for Battlestar Galactica. So I found myself at the age of 24 having been out of school for about a little more than a year, scoring a television show on the Sci Fi Channel that would end up becoming, in my opinion, one of the most influential and important science fiction shows of the decade, if not arguably for all time. 

So that was really exciting for me being involved in that period, and being involved in a genre that I’ve always loved. 

What were some of the scores or who were some of the composers that you recall being really fond of when you were younger?

The scores would include Alan Silvestri’s Back to the Future, Jerry Goldsmith’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a lot of early Danny Elfman work was very influential on me, Basil Poledouris’ Conan the Barbarian. There were so many great genre scores in that time period. 

It was really a wonderful time to be growing up and discovering all this stuff, because you basically couldn’t go to the movies without hearing a masterful piece of orchestral music written by guys of this caliber. 

And John Williams, and Elmer Bernstein, and John Barry, guys like this would contribute these really powerful pieces of music to movies, sometimes, that were not good movies. 

But the scores were always fantastic and that always caught my view, so I found myself, even in third, fourth and fifth grade, I would go to a movie with my friends, and we would walk out of the movie and all my friends would be talking about how great the action was, or how cute the chick was, and I would be commenting on the way that Jerry Goldsmith orchestrated the French horns, or turned a melody upside down. And my friends look at me like I was speaking another language. This was a layer of the movie watching experience that they were not aware of. So ever since I was a kid I was really dialed into movie music and listening to it very critically, so really, I think looking back on those experiences, it’s not a surprise that it ended up being my profession. 

What convinced you to come on board with the Defiance project?

There are so many things about this project that are exciting and appealing. I knew right away that I wanted to be involved. First and foremost, I heard that Syfy [Channel] and Trion [Worlds] were developing this project together, and really wanting to create a shared universe. I knew right away that this was something I wanted to be involved in because this is the kind of thinking that I bring to everything that I do; I always try to write character themes that are memorable, and I use instrumentation that is specific so that when you hear the music that I’ve written for a project, you know immediately what project you’re experiencing, so this is just a continuation of that kind of idea. It’s so exciting to be able to work on different sides of the same universe. 

I got in touch with the people that I knew were working on the show, and I expressed my enthusiasm, and expressed how important I thought music could be in a project of this caliber. 

And then the second main reason is that there were so many of my friends from Battlestar Galactica getting involved with the show, and Caprica as well, so when Kevin Murphy became the show runner – I had a great experience working with him on Caprica. It felt very much like this incredibly challenging group of people were reuniting once more, and I just had to be a part of that. 

To work with these people on a science fiction series and a science fiction world, I would leap at that opportunity any day of the week, and then the fact that I also got to work on a video game and help create this online universe, that was even more exciting. 

It seems like a lot of the kind of core people connected to Battlestar have crossed over onto this project. Is that a fair characterization?

I know that it is. I can see Syfy running interviews with Kevin Murphy, saying that as part of their marketing campaigns. I know it’s very safe for me to say that it is. But it’s true, and I think the thing that is so appealing for most of those people, and truly I can only speak for myself, with Battlestar, we collectively – we were reinventing something that already existed. And the fact that we took so many liberties with it, totally, ultimately is what made it so successful, but it also made it very challenging because a lot of people were coming to that series with preconceived notions for better or worse about what it was to be. 

And the idea with Defiance, that we are creating a new universe from scratch, is very appealing. I might even step back further and just say, in the modern environment of the entertainment business, how many times do you get to work on something brand new? How many times do you get to work on a show, or a movie, or a game, that does not have a sequel, or reboot, or reimagining associated with it? It’s pretty rare. So the idea that we would be able to be involved with a science fiction world that is as expansive as Defiance was incredibly appealing. 

I know that was one of the things that drew me into it. I imagine that was a factor for a lot of the Battlestar alumni as well. 

[Next up: What sets Defiance apart?]

What makes the Defiance universe distinct? How would you describe the overall feel and tone of Defiance? 

This is my own take on it. I’ve had a long time assimilating all of the different aspects of this universe and, for me, what is appealing is that it is a futuristic series. It is a series dealing with alien races, but it’s also grounded both literally, and figuratively. 

We spend a lot of time in a small town. It’s a frontier show at heart. One of the things that I believe is that dealing with extra solar travel, and ultimately finding alien races, these issues that arose during the expansion across North America, the European expansion across North America, these are issues that are going to come back, so I think it’s very timely that you have this series that is a science fiction series, but a lot of the tropes, and a lot of the tension, and a lot of character arcs really could be transplanted into a western. 

It’s not the first series, obviously, to try and deal with this, but what is so interesting is it’s not so much about outlaws, or cowboys and Indians, but it’s really taking the complicated racial relationships and transplanting them so that they’re dealing with humans and other species. 

What is also really fun is that between the game and the show you have these totally different ways of interacting in this universe. You can get the story from both sides: you get a more character driven version, obviously, on the show; and then you get a lot more action and excitement version in the game. But it all feels very closely related, which is exciting for me as a fan. 

How do you describe the musical style of Defiance that you’ve crafted? What are you shooting for there? 

It’s interesting because I have some experience doing science fiction. So there’s a lot of things I’ve already done, and Battlestar Galactica encompassed so many different musical styles that it was a really effective score. But in many ways it made it difficult for me to get started. 

I mean, what can I use in Defiance that will set it apart from Battlestar, or Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, or even the small chamber orchestra sound of The Walking Dead? The thing that is most exciting for me that I think fans are going to hear immediately is the amount of synth programming that I really figured out how to do. This is something that I was never really that interested in. I prided myself in Battlestar, I had very minimal synth programming, and everything was very acoustic, and raw, and real.

Similarly, one might expect with a frontier kind of setting that Defiance would be very organic and based in jangly guitars and, you know, piano, and harmonicas, and all that kind of stuff, but I feel like that’s been done to death. 

The synthesis and programming in my scores for Defiance are so aggressive and in your face that I think fans of my music are going to be taken totally by surprise. It’s so much more aggressive than anything else I’ve ever written – even the cues that are more subdued in the serious have this really powerful distorted bass and other kinds of synthesis in it. It’s very unusual for me. 

What was really nice is that I had a lot of lead time on this. I spent a good couple months on the theme, and that was written well in advance of shooting. I mean, I hadn’t even seen a frame of the show, and I wrote the theme for the game, and for the show, and so it’s been really exciting for me exploring new sounds and finding new ways of incorporating that into this universe. 

The other thing I got to do, which you’ll hear a lot of, is write source music that comes from these alien cultures. When we’re dealing with Irathients or Castithans there was a language that was developed for these races. But beyond that there was also a musical heritage that I was allowed to take part in, and I wrote songs, I wrote ceremony pieces, I wrote source music, I wrote pop music, I wrote classical music. I know what all these things sounds like. So it makes these cultures very real, I think very genuine. And this is something that I got to do a little bit of in the Battlestar spinoff, Caprica, where we wanted to create a world that is an alien world, but has a sense of history, a sense of musical identity. 

And so this was that experience times 100. It’s a side of culture that is so important. What does this society’s music sound like? And in Battlestar we were seeing a society – we were seeing the scraps of the society, the pieces that had remained. So we really didn’t get into that very often. But with Caprica, and again with Defiance, you have a flourishing, albeit struggling, society, but they have music, and they have their own cultures, and they have their own histories. And that’s something that I think needs to be taken very seriously. It needs to be consistent. It needs to be well put together. 

Is there music that you’ve put together that is for just the game or just the show? 

Absolutely. To be honest, I originally set out wanting as much common ground between the two as possible, and there is a lot of thematic material that you’re going to recognize across the platforms. But the more I got into it – there is also a different experience between the game and the show. And the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. The game is about energy, and suspense, and exploration, because it’s an open-world environment. Very different kinds of music to be required because this is a different approach than the show, which is, of course, narrative, but you only need to write precisely what the show needs, and it’s more character based. There’s obviously more dialogue, the stories are more complicated, so I found that, actually, while drawing material from one to the other and inspiration, that generally speaking the game is a lot more energetic music. It’s the more distorted, angrier, really aggressive side of my musicality there, and the show takes on a little more ethereal, a little more nuanced approach. But of course there are big action cues in the show, and there are some very interesting nuance cues in the game, but by and large, the game is more based in action, and the show is more based in characters, so we need to reflect that.

Have you found that juxtaposition of action and more narrative stuff common in the work that you’ve done previously, and in other video game and movie and TV work? Do you go in with different goals when you’re working with something that’s going to be an interactive game, than with media that have a more fixed moment-to-moment experience?

Up until I began my work on Defiance, my answer was absolutely not. For me there is no difference in the approach. The reason is that when I’m scoring a game, I’m still writing character themes, I’m still looking for the overall narrative arc, even though it may not be the most complex arc. You look at a game like Dark Void or SOCOM 4, two main titles that I’ve done so far, there is a character arc from beginning to end, and the music evolves and adapts to reflect that. 

What makes Defiance different is that this is my first MMO. This actually has a different need. The music is functioning in a different way. I don’t really have control over which area of the map you’re going to necessarily go to at any given time. Whereas when I’m scoring a game like Dark Void or SOCOM, I know that certain areas are going to happen first. So I will write music knowing, this is the first one you’re going to hear, this is the second one, this is the third one, and I can build a linear path. 

So I had to throw all that out the window with Defiance and really get down to the DNA of what each of these areas is, and write music that is functional and exciting, but also has a little bit of an identity so that when your roaming from place to place, when you hear a new piece of music or you encounter a new boss or you go into a new dungeon area, you feel like you’ve gotten somewhere because you hear new things in the music. But I can’t control necessarily what order you hear things in. 

So it was exciting for me, honestly. It was a very exciting experience of trying to craft music that, in a way, needs to last longer. When I’m writing music for the single player campaign, you need it to last anywhere from 12 to say 24 or 30 hours of interest. But people could play this for years. So I really strove to make it exciting and have a lot of layers and interesting things, and alternate solos, and really aggressive, fun, almost dance-inspired rhythms so that you can just jam out to this stuff for days.