A Moment With Composer Danny Pelfrey
Danny Pelfrey, an Emmy-nominated television composer, has created music for six Star Trek interactive Activision games, including the best-selling Star Trek game Star Trek Armada, and "Game of the Year" nominee Star Trek Elite Force. Other games include Among his successes are Steel Panthers, Fantasy General, Thunderscape, Entomorph, Age of Rifles, Pacific General, Imperialism, Dark Reign, Rise of the Shadow Hand, Sword of Heroes and Pajama Sam.
Emmy-nominated for his underscore to a Felicity episode entitled "Help for the Lovelorn," Pelfrey is currently the weekly TV composer for CBS' That's Life and ABC's Spin City, for which he also wrote the main title theme. Recently Danny Pelfrey's instrumental piece "Felicity and Ben's Theme" (known to most Felicity fans as "that piano song" on the December 19, 2001 episode) became the most requested song by viewers of the WB series. [an error occurred while processing this directive] Digital Game Developer wanted to find out about the process of composing for games.
DMN: What are the differences in your strategies and processes between all the different kinds of music you compose, including for TV shows, games, and other media?
DP: The media doesn’t determine the process nearly as much as the setting and story. I’m most influenced by the kind of story, the kinds of characters. The only thing different for games is that the music needs to be modular so it’s going to have the desired effect. With games, the modules a player controls determines a specific action and the music has to flow with whatever sequence of events takes place. The music gets cut up in different ways. Audio slugs are triggered by the action, so I don’t score the action per-se. I have to be aware of complimentary keys relationships and sonic integrity, as well as tempos.
This is unique from dramatic composition for film and TV, where the music is dependent on the dramatic action onscreen. There is also the matter of pacing. The arc of a dramatic scene is going to dictate the kind of pacing in a film or TV show, whereas the emotional arc is the kind of thing that you look for in a game.
Like I said, the architecture is going to be dictated by the story.
When film and television become interactive, I will be writing music in the style of games.
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