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.
I pondered the solutions to these concerns for a long time. I ultimately found the answers to both a very long way away from my desk.
The first came to me on a beautiful woodland walk when Graham and I were discussing our shared niggle about how to find a way to write more music.
The idea was to create a recurring character in our series who would allow us to create music in manner akin to how films and TV series are scored. Each story would give us the opportunity to evolve and develop the character’s musical theme in different ways —such as colouring the harmony to fit the tone of the story or changing the rhythm to suit the mood and setting.
