BEHIND THE SCENES DVD
The Legendary Edition of this product contains a DVD bonus. The first of three chapters is titled: Inside the Echoes of War, where fans may explore behind the scenes how the Echoes of War was created from the early jamming of ideas between Russel Brower (Blizzard Director of Audio and Video) and Hiroaki Yura. The DVD starts with footage showing closeups of the musicians rehearsing the music script at the same time a soprano is singing. This intro will definitely make fans go into memory-lane overdrive. It is the music played in that Starcraft scene when Admiral Dugalle and Stukov are talking at the Battlecruiser bridge in the opening cinematic of Brood War. That’s a very poweful and emotional opera music score.
The Starcraft intro is then switched to the Wrath of the Lich King’s login screen music while showing the violinists and other musicians play their instruments. Russel Bowder comments various orchestras have approached them before requesting to license their game music to perform it. But what most attracted Blizzard was that Eminence wanted to create an album compiling a collection of the best scores across all their Gaming IPs. Musicians and singers from United States, Japan and Australia came together to craft this musical masterpiece. We can see scenes of Ruseel Bowder traveling 29 hours to Australia to meet up the Eminence Orchestra Musicians and Eminence visiting the Blizzard Entertainment offices at Irvine, California. This product has been co-developed by Blizzard and Eminence jointly. So, although it is a licensed product, you can be sure this is a work done along and guided with the collaboration of Blizzard composers and audio directors from the ground up.
 |  |  |
Russel Brower, Hiroaki Yura and Phillip Chu alternate onscreen explaining their first meeting, perusing through music score sheets together, reimagining Blizzard music to fit and listen neatly in a symphony orchestra. This DVD reveals in detail how difficult it was from the very beginning to organize, and jam ideas, to reach a consensus
It’s quiet interesting to listen to Russel Brower’s anecdotes about his beginnings in this career, and the moment in his life he knew gaming was his passion. Some years ago, Russel and his family visited an arcade room to take a soda and play pinball. They became friends with the owner of the premises. One day he showed them his new arcade game. It was Pong. And then the first console games started coming into the market and he was hooked. And he collected all these consoles and their games. And learned all about the bleeps, music and special effect sounds. Then in the early 90s, games started to move from MIDI files to actual sound recordings and synthesizers. Games started to sound more compeling as a genre to writing music.
Hiroaki Yura (Director of Eminence Symphony Orchestra) tells his life story as a young man at school, and how he ended up doing what he loves to do, leaving his legacy to listeners and colleagues as a worldwide-known musician.
Phillip Chu (Conductor Eminence Symphony Orchestra) talks about his experience when he was first invited to conduct an orchestra for a game project. William Motzing (Lecturer, Sydney Conservatorium of Music) doesn’t see any differences between big budget film’s music and the one from games, so it wasn’t difficult to accept the job and enjoy it.
 |  |  |
Glenn Stafford (Blizzard Composer) talks in this DVD describing the Brood War Opening Cinematic and you can see footage of the soprano singer performing it at the recording studio. Derek Duke (Blizzard Composer) also participates in this DVD along with Go Shiina (Composer / Arranger) who arranged one of Derek’s Starcraft music pieces for Echoes of War. Both are so excited to working with each other, and you get to listen to Go Shiina express his feelings and what he first thought of Derek’s work. He found this Starcraft theme fascinating with plenty of small delicate elements. Go Shiina is extremely well known and loved within the community for his work such as Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection.
The second chapter is titled: Kow Otani: Taking on Diablo. Kow Otani is a well known composer of feature films and anime music. He was invited to do the soundtrack of Shadows of the Colossus. He has received awards for best Game Music composition and is one of the most outstanding composers of Japan today. He was invited as a guest to be present at the concert. However, Hiroaki Yura requested Kow Otani to be involved in this production. His involvement in this project is very much hyped by the Game Music communities as he is one of the most sought after video game composer of all time. Here he was asked to do additional compositions based on themes from Diablo. It took him three or four days to compose the Diablo III Cinematic music. He is not a gamer, but because of his experience composing for feature films, he was able to compose his own arrangement. He had the pleasure of working with Aika who composed the lyrics for the piece and voiced the theme: Last Angel (Bonus) and Children of the Worldstone. You get to see Aika on video at the recording studio singing her lungs and soul out.
Next page: Bonus Content > > >
