Tuesday, August 4, 2009

CG Challenge - Secret Agent (part 1)

Recently, my brother and his team decided to participate in a CG Challenge at CGSociety. Now, I'm not doing anything CG-related, but since this time the challenge subject was a video, they needed some background music. So my bro asked me if I felt putting together a tune for it. I DID feel like putting together a tune and so I hopped on board.

The instructions of the challenge say:
"This challenge asks you to render a scene of secrecy and espionage. Depict a scene of a secret agent in a binding circumstance. Are they caught in an ingenious trap by an evil genius? or about to bring down an enemy base? Show us cunning devices, subtle disguises, and really cool cars."

Sounds exciting!
Here's the link to the challenge page.

...so I had some e-mail exchanges, Skype conversations and chats with my brother, and we were able to share an understanding of what the atmosphere should be like. Initial sketches and images gave me an idea of how the music could sound.

The guiding keywords were:
  • Time period: late 70's - early 80's (?)

  • Lots of action

  • Not dead-serious. Comedy elements are included

  • cartoon / comic book style, rather than realistic characters


In addition to the rough sketches I had seen, I was given an animatic (a rough draft animation) depicting the first seconds of the animation. Based on this, I put together an audio draft.

Here it goes:


The best part are the horns haha. For the first time I used AMG's Kick-Ass Brass VSTi. Pretty awesome sounding. You don't get that from a hardware synth. I'm really happy with its quality, it was worth the purchase.

But anyways, my bro and his team were pretty happy overall. The only thing they wanted to have changed was the intro. It should be more mysterious and calmer.

OK, no problem, that's what drafts are for. So I sat down to come up with an alternative version...

...to be continued!

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