Crysis 2 - The Music Production
Welcome to the first article in an on-going piece about the music production of Crysis 2. At the bottom of the article you will find a profile on the authors plus download links to all music files available discussed here. Make sure to share your feedback and keep an eye open for Part II for more insight into the music and Crysis 2 soundtrack downloads!
Part I: The Beginning
Crytek: Hello! Please introduce yourself and tell us how everything started.
Borislav Slavov:
Hello and thank you for inviting me! It is a great pleasure for me to share with you the exciting story of Crysis 2 Music production.
My name is Borislav Slavov and it all started in the summer of 2009, when the Senior Audio Director of Crytek, Campbell Askew, visited me in the studio in Sofia and asked me to produce the music for the forthcoming (at that time)
NANOSUIT 2 Trailer. It was a great honor for me and I immediately started to work on it. Campbell’s idea to use a classical solo violin (as a hint of the human spirit in the game) proved to be a very good and inspiring one. A month later, the trailer and the music were warmly welcomed by the public and I was invited to join the project as a Composer and Music Director of the Crytek Music team.
Lead by the CEO Cevat Yerli and developed with the cutting-edge CryENGINE 3 technology, Crysis 2 provided a big area for creativity and interactivity in the music production.
One of the main goals that we set for the music at the very beginning was to support not just the Action feeling, but Action full of Drama. We wanted to make the player feel not only tension by listening to the music, but to experience a full range of human emotions like
Fear, Sadness, Loneliness, Anger, Anticipation and Uncertainty.
The setting of the game and the story, full of twists, were an excellent foundation for evoking all these emotions. Here are the very first tracks produced for Crysis 2, parts of which you have probably heard on the trailers and Crysis TV. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much I did while working on them:
Right click the link and "save as" to download the file
Crytek: How did the collaboration between the Crytek team and Dynamedion originally come about?
Borislav Slavov:
At approximately the same time when I was invited to join, Tilman Silescu (from Dynamedion) had also applied for Crysis 2 music production. Luckily, Cevat and the senior management of Crytek liked all tracks of ours and decided that to achieve a versatile and quality score we should unite our skills and work together in the Crytek Music team.
Campbell Askew:
Cevat and I felt that we would need a second composer for such a huge undertaking. Tilman had written some great music for another of our projects and he was the creative head of a major German Music and SFX Company Dynamedion. Cevat agreed with the choice so I had everything in place. Talent, experience and a great project for them both to collaborate on.
Borislav Slavov:
Through a series of meetings I introduced the interactive music approach and direction to Tilman and we started to work. Both sides were brainstorming and exchanging feedback on a daily basis, which was not only amazing experince but also so much fun. Listening to each others ideas was inspiring and provocative at the same time. One of the ideas born this way, was to make 2 different versions of the same battle track – an orchestra-percussive variant, meant to be played when the player fights the cell-ops mercenaries and a second version – with the same composition base, but augmented with alien-representative electronics. Thus when the player goes from fighting humans to a battle with aliens, it feels like the same music is being „corrupted” by the alien presence.
Have a listen to this composition pair here:
Right click the link and "save as" to download the file
This is how an amazing collaboration was born and worked until they day we were ready to go for the orchestral recordings in the beautiful city of Budapest.
Stay tuned for Part 2 where you will find out how the main themes of Crysis 2 were composed by someone you might be familiar with...
Crysis 2 The Music Production Authors
Campbell Askew
Nationality: British
Position: Senior Audio Director
Studio: Crytek Frankfurt
Previous work: Event Horizon soundtrack
Bio: Campbell has worked in film and TV since the age of 16. He won a BAFTA nomination for his work on Ken Branaghs' Henry V. He won an EMMY for his work on Band of Brothers. Campbell moved into game sound in 2002 and started his work with Crytek in 2009 as the Senior Audio Director.
Borislav Slavov
Nationality: Bulgarian
Position:Music Director/Composer
Studio: Crytek Black Sea, Sofia
Previous work: Knights of Honor, WorldShift, Two Worlds 2
Bio: Eleven years ago I realized that the passion of my life was the music for games and so I started my career in the industry. I love listening to the soundtrack productions of composers such as Harry Gregson-Williams, John Powell, Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, Trevor Jones and many others. Another passion of mine is the folklore music from all over the world, which greatly influences my work.
Since 2001 I've been working with Black Sea Studio team (now Crytek Black Sea) as a music composer. In 2009 the Crytek Frankfurt team invited me to join the Crysis 2 development team. In the future some of my goals are to participate in the further development of CryENGINE 3 interactive music system and produce music and audio for another great Crytek game.
All Music Downloads
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