Geoff Zanelli

No, it turns out that I can't do many things with my life. I can do only this with my life. And I say it facetiously, but it is actually kind of true. This is my one skill. But I always wanted to do this, though. Okay, so I became a musician pretty late in life compared to most musicians that I know. I was one week shy of my 16th birthday when I got a guitar. And that was what kind of started the journey, but I very, very quickly realized it was going to be a career, music anyway was going to be my career, and that I wanted to be able to write and change styles and change genres all the time. And that sort of naturally draws you into film music and media music. You look at the expanse of the types of projects I get to do, and it's very, very different from being in a band. Plus you couple that with, I don't really like getting in a sweaty bus and traveling across the country with five other people. So I was never going to be in a band. It was not for me. But I don't know that I chose it. I think it really was sort of the only thing that I really could see myself spending my life doing once I got even reasonably good at playing a guitar. It was like, no, this is the path.

I definitely had that clarity of focus. That's exactly the way to put it. It was a drive. But I guess on the downside, I got my last promotion when I was like 21. I became composer, and that I shall remain.

Oh, right. Yeah, no, okay, I went off to Berklee College of Music, which is in Boston, and I studied there. They had an engineering production track, and they had a film scoring track, which is now called media scoring. And at the time, it was focused on film and television. It was actually kind of before games was even really an industry that you could consistently work in. I mean, I'm talking about the early 90s. This was like the beginning of game composer as a full-time calling. But when I finished at Berklee... I started interning, actually, even while I was at Berklee. I would come out in the summers to LA and I would intern for Hans Zimmer, who is a film composer. He was writing The Lion King score when I first met him. To put a date on it, I think that's 1994. And I was his intern until I graduated Berklee a couple of years later. And then I came out and worked for another composer who worked at Hans' studio named John Powell. That was really the first job that I had. I was John's assistant. And I did that for three years. And then I got my last promotion. I went freelance and became composer. So that would have been right around '99 or 2000 is when I went freelance as a composer. And if you look at my credits, you'll see I worked as what's called an additional music composer on John's movies, which means maybe I do a couple of the scenes here and there, but he was largely responsible for the score. Then I did that for Hans on a number of projects. And I suppose the notable kind of breakout project like that for me was the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, where it was written rather quickly. I think we had two or three weeks to write the whole score. So it was Hans and a team of like eight or nine composers, of which I guess I sort of moved to the head of the class, so to speak, on the project. And that was kind of the beginning of the real Jeff Zanelli as composer story, I guess.

Yes, well, that's an unusual circumstance. No, no. I think it's sort of well established. People know there was another composer on the project before, and that's what happened. So I get a call from Hans, who is now the second composer. The movie was on the final mix stage already. They were already doing the final mix, and they didn't have score. And Hans called me on a Saturday and said, you need to get to the studio. I almost did a Hans Zimmer impression and then I thought better of it. I used my own voice. You've got to get to the studio and watch this movie. We're starting right away. We're finishing in three weeks. You can't go to the Justin Timberlake concert. You're going to be working. And so I went to the studio with a whole gang, and it really was literally like Hans had this five-minute piece of music he'd written overnight, and he gave it to all of us. And then it was like, we just need to start writing music. Just go. And I sort of loved the chaos of that. It was really like being in the eye of a hurricane. Again, I had, I guess, that sort of clarity and focus. I was able to just put my head down and write music like crazy for those three weeks. And it's kind of nice to know when it stops. I know when I get to sleep again. Until then, I will work on Pirates.

No, well, I always did, though. It's funny because I'm a gamer with Atari roots, right? That's where it started for me. So I'm the old generation of video gamers. But I think, in a way, the 90s is really kind of the perfect time to illustrate when video game music got super serious. Do you know what I mean? That was when you started to hear fully orchestral scores. It was like for a minute there, games were promoting themselves as, oh, we have a full Hollywood-sounding score. And nowadays, I don't see that type of promotion, because I think the games industry has recognized very clearly: we're doing our own thing now. Do you know what I mean? It's a genre, and it's actually very different in some ways from film and television, which is also... it's almost like a third category. I'm a little bit lucky I get to do all three of those things, but some composers excel in games or they excel in television or they excel in film, but not the others. So, I don't know, I was always built in the way that I wanted to spread out and do something different. The conversation I have with my agent all the time is, what I want to do next is something totally different from whatever I finished, whatever that means. So I'm not necessarily the composer that's going to do only superhero movies or only sci-fi video games or only horror movies. I love, love, love that I get to just go all over the place. That's probably why it doesn't feel like work. I still feel like I'm playing around a lot.

Yes. That's exactly right. So, I wonder if everybody knows Chris made a very, very cool movie called Outlander, gosh, 15 years ago now, or close to it, which was kind of a take on the Beowulf story, but it's set in Viking times with, I guess you'd say, a spaceman, an alien man that crashes to Earth and brings the monster with him, basically, and then, using Viking technology, has to go fight this high-tech monster. It's quite cool. It's a monster movie. It's really fun. It's a multi-genre sort of sci-fi fantasy thing, which is exactly in the world of what I want to do. And I actually met Chris through... I would have been brought onto that project... let's see, maybe I met Howard McCain, who directed it. And then I met with Chris and John Schimmel, who produced. So we made a movie together. I mean, it really started that way. And I think really what happened then was Chris said, I'm making Star Citizen, and it's going to be split into really two worlds. We have the PU, which everyone's been playing for years now, and we have Squadron 42, which is narrative, very different story-wise from the PU. In the PU, the players are writing their own story. In Squadron 42, the player is involved in another bigger story that already exists. And that, I think, is what drew Chris to ask me about it, because it's very much designed to feel like you're moving through a very long epic. It's story-driven, and that's, I guess, the province of film composers. He recognized how I was able to tell his very complicated story in Outlander and then how that might expand out into the universe of Star Citizen, which is quite a big story to tell.

Yeah, well, we've never been in person together, funny you mention it, but we Zoom every now and again just to kind of sync up with each other, not necessarily to get the music to sort of cross-pollinate from one to the other. It's really not the goal. It's always been kind of separate identities, but we're both big supporters of each other's work. And I'm eternally jealous that Pedro's music is out in the world already and you all get to hear it. That's why something like Hold the Line, which you were talking about, is a little glimpse into the enormous amount of work that I've already done on Squadron that won't come to light until we get it into the players' hands. [Pedro has] like a rolling delivery where every few months you all get to hear his new brilliant work. So I just call him to tell him I'm jealous.

Yes. Bagpipes. I'm going to answer your questions in reverse order, because bagpipes is the order of the day. So it's funny. Okay. Actually, that sequence, which you do see, the opening, it's a cinematic in-game, so that music was written very specifically for that sequence. And everything, obviously, is still a work in progress, but believe me, we're keeping the bagpipes. We experimented quite a lot with different instrumentation for that, for the fleet reveal. Let me back it up, actually. Initially, that piece of music is written as a UEE theme. It actually functions sort of like... most of the world's navies have a theme song, right? The U.S. Navy, I think it's Eternal Father, Strong to Save. It's a hymn. And so we started there. It was something Chris Roberts and I talked about. What if we had a hymn for the UEE Navy? What would their theme be? And in fact, there are even very wide variations of this piece of music already getting used in various parts of the game. We only showed one little glimpse of it for Hold the Line. But that is a theme for the UEE, for the Navy as a whole. And it works in all sorts of ways. It can be very emotional. It can be very somber. It can be triumphant, it can be officious, it can be used as score; there's a set of lyrics actually written for it. So that's a piece of music that's going to be heard many, many times throughout the game. But the fleet reveal is one of the first times you hear it. And I thought, well, what needs to happen here is it needs to be a piece of music that represents that the UEE is not one country or one ethnicity or one nation's purpose. It's the purpose of Earth. I mean, it's in the title, UEE. So the piece of music could represent really any culture and all cultures from anywhere on Earth, because here we are united in defense of our planet. So it meant we could go exploring instrumentation, anything really, anything that has the right grandeur for the moment. And so there was an orchestral version of that sequence that played nicely, but maybe felt, I don't know, not bespoke enough to the sequence. And once we got to the bagpipes, and there are also taiko drums from Japan and there are some drums from South America, so it actually is a combination of many cultures, to represent: this is our fleet. This is the gathering that we have put together to defend the planet. I realize that's a lofty goal for a 10-second piece of music, but this is the type of ambition.

So you confirmed that this is music that people would hear in the game. It's the UEE theme.

That one is indeed thematic. Then the rest of the Hold the Line video is also Squadron music, but not necessarily being used thematically. It's more like, especially because of the way it's cut, we're going from location to location and event to event, and we're not necessarily showing it in linear order. So you're getting a sense of what some of the soundscape of the score will be, but I think there's a lot more than bagpipes that is going to stand out, I think, to make the score feel special for all of the different, especially places, but all of the different story arcs that we're telling with this. I mean, it's a huge story.

Okay, with Chris, I met him actually scoring a film that he was producing called Outlander. And I think probably because he had heard music that I had written for the Pirates of the Caribbean, the first one, Curse of the Black Pearl, with Hans, and I think took a meeting, looked at his movie, and I mean, we had a monster destroying a Viking village, and I thought, I have to do this. I'm raised on fantasy movies and sci-fi and adventure, and actually my first experience with Chris was as a film composer. So when Star Citizen came around he said, look, we're doing this narrative, story-driven campaign that's part of the universe, would you like to take a look at it? And of course I came and I saw his early ambitions and goals. This would have been, I don't know, a couple of years ago. And sign me up, because, well, the other thing is I knew Chris even before Outlander, not personally, but I knew him because I played his games. I played Wing Commander. That was the exact time in my life when I was in high school when I had that perfect moment when you can game all the time. And so Wing Commanders 1 and 2 were those years for me, actually.

Well, I might. Yes. Sometimes if the movie gets the script, other times they will send you the movie and you watch it. In the case of Outlander, they had already shot it, so I did watch it. In the case of Star Citizen, obviously the game wasn't done. So they talked about story outline, what are the main characters, main plot points, and those would be the starting points for a composer. So the goal for me is to have memorable themes that track certain characters through the game. Like if you watch the vertical slice, you see Old Man and he has a piece of music that goes when he launches and there's an intro sequence that plays. His music, and the squadron itself, or really the game itself, has a theme of its own as well, which people are starting to recognize. It's in the Bishop Speech from a while ago, and it comes in varying forms throughout the vertical slice as well.

I think we're certainly planning on some fun Easter eggs. Part of the joy of Star Citizen, there is a whole lore building. We're building a world, and in that world, there would certainly be music. So what I'm mostly tasked with is the score of the game, which is not in-world, it's actually more the player's experience, but within the world we're exploring ways of creating music and art and things that exist in that world. So let me say, don't be surprised if you find some really fun Easter eggs when you get into the game regarding space radio.

It's one of the hallmarks of any Chris Roberts project. He wants that lived-in, diegetic universe. And that means there are things that are going to be on TVs. There are conversations by characters you don't think are important to the story going on in the background. And maybe they're listening to music on a boombox.

Totally, and it makes it immersive. In fact, actually, I did the music for the Cutlass commercial, which actually had a radio in it, and we switch over to the tango, and that's little old me playing the guitar.

Right, sure, obviously. Well, look, the point of the score actually is to play the player's experience. So certainly if something is horrific, you'll have horrific music. If something is tense, you'll have that. If it's heroic, you'll have that. So the short answer is yes, you're going to hear all sorts of kinds of music. Kind of a sonic palette, I'd say, that we're going to use for the game, which doesn't mean we never color outside the lines, but it does mean that we have some consistency. But there are a few moments in the vertical slice which start to hint at some of the more tense discoveries you're going to make. Discovering those, well, I mean, Trejo's chained to a pipe, you know what I mean? So you get moments like that, and I would say that would be the tip of the iceberg in terms of drama that we have in this story.

Well, a couple things. The vertical slice is actually something that's educational for us as the development team as well. It's actually why we make these things. It's shown to the community so you can see what we've been up to, but the reality is that is how I gain insight into whether or not my music's working, and I don't believe it's working 100%. The thing about what I do is I write music and then I find any way that I can incrementally improve any bit of it. I happen to agree actually in a lot of cases with the way it's played in the vertical slice. It's a pre-alpha, right?

That's the very first implementation.

Right, exactly. And it's not necessarily the final version of the mix or the final version of the volume or the intensity of anything. So, in fact, I actually went through it with my red pen and I wrote down a little bit: this is what we need to carve here, this is what we need to do there. And working with the audio team in the UK, the game engine is going to...

The music logic system.

The music logic system will be tweaked in such a way that it'll support the player's experience with the music as opposed to invade it. So let's say the launch sequence, well, that's a good moment for music to be in your face and big. But if you're flying from one place to another, it's not necessarily the place for the big tune. It's more ambient, it should be setting the mood, and is it tense, or is it heroic, or is it that, but it doesn't need to overstate it. So those are all things that we are working on, myself and the audio team in the UK, to make it better. Let me put it this way, the pre-alpha version that you guys saw in the vertical slice is the absolute worst that that could ever be. And in fact, it's quite promising to see it looking this good this early.

I know one of the features of the music logic system that wasn't completely online at the time that we did the demo is how it mixes with the dialogue. The music is supposed to dip down at the moments when people talk and stuff like that.

Well, and there's another thing the music logic is doing in there that would be transparent, I think, when you're watching a video of a playback like that, which is what that was. The music is written in such a way that the music logic system inside the game can actually score the player's actions as they happen. That was step one when I talked with the audio team, Phil and Lee Banyard, about how can we get the game to make the decisions that I would make if this were a movie and I were scoring it. So all the music is written... Let me put it this way. I would not be surprised if there are whole pieces of music that certain players don't hear because they went that way instead of that way. There's a mass of music that's there and the engine is making a lot of clever, very situation-dependent decisions about what to play to the player as they're going through.

Well, and it is different, right? Because there isn't a version of E.T. where he doesn't go home and no one had to write that music, right? But in this case, we know certain things most likely will happen, but we also don't know when they're going to happen. That's another thing. But what I did really was with the music logic systems, let's say you're flying a ship. And you're in combat, right? But that can mean a lot of different things. There can be two enemies, there can be ten, there can be none, they can be right around the corner. So those are all different pieces of music, but they're written in such a way that they can transition at any point from one to the next, and the game engine can keep track of what's happening to the player. Did the bad guy come out? Are you outnumbered? Are you injured? Are you winning? Are you losing? And it can switch into and out of a grim version of the same music, a heroic version, a more ambient version. And this exists for all sorts of different levels, game states. Is it a more epic scene? Is it more intimate? Is it hand-to-hand combat? Is it EVA?

So, well, the game itself is a good place to start. And I think once we kind of got a sense of what the story was, we went, okay, this is actually classic space opera, right? Which is why I think in the vertical slice here, it's not entirely, but largely orchestral. And there's a real good reason for that, which is that once we actually record this with a live orchestra, we should talk about that actually, you're going to hear humanity and real people and musicians and something acoustic and real, and that grounds this massive, unbelievably, I don't know, epic experience in something you can feel. When I record orchestras, I don't like the glossy, distant orchestra. I like when you can hear players and bows scraping and breaths and all of that stuff, and that kind of...

The texture.

There's a texture. It gets into the blood of the music and you hear it and it does something to a person. You know what I mean? And so I want it to grab you and pull you into your screen. But that is another thing actually that wasn't in the vertical slice. Those are demos of the music. Savvy musicians will have noticed it's not a live orchestra yet, but we're going to be recording this thing with a massive orchestra, and I'm excited.