After completing Castle Araluen, Loch Elvenes, and the Visken Forest, I began to realise that I had two major niggles with our plan, relating to our creative process and way of working.

The first was how long it took to get to the music writing phase of the project. One of the reasons we founded Ayane Studios was to enable us to write more music and specifically cinematic music, yet after more than a year of hard work, I still hadn’t made it to the scoring phase.

The second was that I was really worried I was inadvertently recreating a similar way of working to my tech job. I had effectively tethered myself to my desk due to needing a beast of a computer to do my work. The key difference was that instead of doing engineering CAD, I was now doing Artistic CAD. While this was a huge improvement, (especially as I am now my own boss!), it was still putting a big restriction on my freedom, confining me to working in one place. Which bothered me a lot… to my surprise.