Austin Wintory on the hero's journey in Sword of the Sea (Part 2)

Austin Wintory on the hero's journey in Sword of the Sea (Part 2)

The Sword of the Sea composer offers insights into the roles of the choirs and solo piano in the score, and inspiration provided by Werner Herzog.

By Jerry Jeriaska of The Ongaku

Early in development on Giant Squid's adventure game, creative director Matt Nava shared a clip from an interview with Werner Herzog. The documentary film director related his interest in making a film about skateboarding, set against a soundtrack performed by a Russian Orthodox church choir. There, amidst the bruised elbows of the skateparks, he perceived a "feeling that is sacred."

Sword of the Sea composer Austin Wintory pondered the significance of this enigmatic statement. "Herzog, he comes across in that interview, as he always does, like a brilliant mad scientist," Wintory recalls. "As with a lot of his ideas, I said, 'You know, there's probably something to that!'"

If you haven't already, check out part one of this interview on thematic precursors of Sword of the Sea — here.

Recording Songs of Innocence

Soundtrack trailer, via Giant Squid

Sword of the Sea's cinematic intro lingers on a stone swordsman, the Wraith. The sequence is set to solo piano and the intoning of a children's choir. Struck from above by a drop of water, a flame of consciousness engulfs the statue's visor.

Upon waking, the Wraith throws its sword in the air, which levitates before striking the ground, allowing the swordsman to steps onto the flat surface of the blade. A common element of video game lore is repurposed as a vehicle of flight, the Hoversword.

"In this case, it's interesting how the actual theme came to me very early," Wintory says of the moment of inspiration. "We were all still figuring out what the game is. I found the theme—but I didn't quite know what it meant!"

"There was a mysteriousness—definitely the idea of being an awoken warrior was in the earliest drafts. How the opening of the game plays out went through a lot of different versions, but it always had in common the idea of a character being born, not aware of their role. ['From a drop, a flame'] definitely tumbled out of those conversations."

The Raw Sessions, via Austin Wintory's YouTube channel

Wintory learned of an education program, the Phoenix Boys Choir, through a casual aside, as easy to dismiss as Herzog's humorous skateboarding concept: "A young composer named Ryan Gunderson was living in that area and reached out to me. He just kind of threw into his email, "Hey, by the way, I work with this boys choir. If you ever need a boys choir, we're one of the top ones.

"In my mind, I wasn't thinking of the choir as representing the idea of connecting with nature—but here, it was like, 'Well, let's try that.' What started essentially as a joke blossomed over time into using the choir and the voices as a kind of proxy for the character arc of the Wraith, of your character. It became its own thing but it absolutely started where I said, 'Let's try the Herzog idea. I love it!

"If you invest in learning about the lore, you discover that you were previously an implement of destruction, and you've flipped the script now. There's a real archetypal William Blake 'Innocence-to-Experience' kind of arc."

The early tutorial areas of Sword of the Sea align thematically with Blake's illuminated poems, wherein subjects from "Infant Joy" to "The Lamb" depict in engraved phrases and illustrations the awakening of sense perception. Giant Squid presents a fantasy setting where skateboard manoeuvres are elevated to mythological status, and the children's choir heralds the start of the hero's journey.

 

 

From Tabula Rasa to Songs of Experience

Sword of the Sea's antagonist manifests its influence through visual representations of environmental stagnation. As the player's clash with Tor Namun grows increasingly adversarial, we begin to hear a deep, resounding tenor belonging to the London Voices choir.  

The effect is analogous to William Blake's "Songs of Experience." Expanding upon the earlier themes, a fuller scope of the human condition is depicted in painful reminders "The Chimney Sweeper" and "Infant Sorrow."

"I love the idea of this warrior being portrayed with children's choir, and then increasingly encroached upon by this kind of gruff men's choir, until the two find their way to reconcile with one another," the composer explains. "I thought I really need something that's starkly different. Baritone men is just obviously not the same thing. I made the commitment to bifurcate them."

The score features soloists Tom Strahle on electric guitar, Paul Cartwright on violin - As Noted edited by Dallas Crane

Wintory determined that an intermediary step would provide further nuance to the innocence-to-experience arc. "So, I decided to use these little snippets of the actual SATB (soprano, alto, tenor and bass) mixed adult choir in the transition moment," he says. "You hear them a bit in the tail-end of the starry dream world, from the Sacred River into the Boiling Cavern. That's where you get bits serving as a bridge, like a hand-off."

Further heightening the dramatic intensity of the conflict, the composer remotely monitored a four-hour recording session by the Thai percussion ensemble, produced by Seathencity. The ranat thum instrument is a low-pitched xylophone, prominently featured in the intro to "A Perfect Wave."

"The music that you hear on the soundtrack is the music from the game, but sensibly structuring that into soundtrack-sized pieces of music requires a bit of editing," Wintory says. "You just want to create a coherent listening experience that has the right kind of emotional flow to it."

Depicting the Hero With a Thousand Faces

In Joseph Campbell’s analysis of comparative mythology, the author argues that key narrative elements inform a collective vision of the archetypal hero figure. This extraordinary individual wages heroic battles, granting advantages that help to define a new era.

"One of the inspirations for Journey was Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey,'" the composer wrote in a 2012 PlayStation Blog post, archived on Medium. "That concept of a metamorphosis, or emotional arc, is at the core of everything in this game, including its score."

Full Official Soundtrack with Composer Commentary

The composer observes that all of his collaborations with Nava share in common a narrative emphasis on communing with nature, where the hero's journey figures within an interdependent holistic ecology.

"Abzû is also a heavily choral score, but it wasn't for that reason," the composer says." Abzû swings back and forth between this natural world and a dreamlike, surreal afterlife or nether-region. And the choir became a way to connect those—where the choir is emblematic of the spiritual domain."

In commentary on developing Sword of the Sea, Nava mentions one goal of the gameplay's design is to emulate the experience of learning how to surf. The Hoverswoarding mechanics harken back to the feel of early 3D skateboarding, surfing, and snowboarding games.

Tricks and trophies are presented in Sword of the Sea as such, establishing that gameplay lineage at the foundation the fantasy storytelling. In capturing that spirit, Wintory was encouraged to emphasize the familiar and the personal:

"I remember Matt came down to my studio here in L.A... I was playing for him a bunch of my sketches and showing him the different instruments.

"Matt, at one point, said, 'Have you considered piano being part of this? You know, we never use piano—something about that just kind feels right here.'

"I have an upright piano here in my studio, so I turned to it and I just started improvising these very simple figures of just rolling arpeggios up and down, just in a flowing continuous way. Nothing too fast, nor too slow."

"He was like—'That feels like the game in summary.' There was this sense of continuous momentum."

"If anything the piano is to this score what the oboe was to Abzû," Wintory adds. "I really wanted the piano to live at the heart of it. There was something interesting about this drone flute juxtaposed against the piano that seemed to work nicely."

 

 

Austin Wintory is a composer and based in Los Angeles, California, and frequent collaborator of Giant Squid – austinwintory.com | Spotify Artist Page | X.com

Back to blog