Delicious Compositions: Winifred Phillips Makes “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” Extra Sweet

by Louis Bedigian

 

“I didn't really feel like I was writing music at all – I felt like I was telling Charlie's story.”

 

No game is as sweet as those that sound the part.  Sure, some look the part.  A few gems play the part and become instant classics.  But in the end it’s the games that sound the best that we remember.  That’s because the best games are made by the most dedicated developers.  When they go to work each day they don’t just look at the gameplay or the graphics, they examine every aspect.  And when graphics become dated and gameplay advances with eventual sequels, it’s the original music that we’ll remember.

 

God of War is a prime example.  This dark action game launched a new series for Sony that will grow with each generation.  The music, on the other hand, will be remembered and utilized to remind gamers of what they’re playing, just as Konami did with Metal Gear Solid; just as Nintendo did with Super Mario Bros.

 

God of War’s composer, Winifred Phillips, is quickly moving up in the game industry, working on several key projects that she is not allowed to talk about.  Her latest addition is set in a zany world, though you’d never know it by the sound.  Once you hear the music you’ll be salivating for a soundtrack release.

 

“When I started the project I had no idea that Tim Burton would even be aware of my existence, much less would actually be listening to my music and evaluating each track!” said Winifred Phillips, composer of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory video game.  “As soon as I found out this would be happening, I went into an immediate state of denial.  I forced myself not to think about it.”

 

There was little for her to worry about though.  “Working with someone of that artistic caliber is both tremendously inspiring and very intimidating at the same time,” she says.  It’s true that Tim is a visual and storytelling genius, but what Winifred didn’t realize is that she’s a genius, too: a musical genius.

 

Her delightful, orchestral soundtrack turned Charlie and the Chocolate Factory into a world of musical amazement.  Tim Burton agrees, and Winifred couldn’t be happier.  “There is nothing like the feeling you get when your work meets the approval of someone you admire.  I’ve been very fortunate.”

 

Developing a taste for more of her creations, GameZone Online took a first-class trip to Willy’s factory for an interview with the woman behind these Wonka sounds, Winifred Phillips.

 

 

First God of War, now Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  I take it you've finally been bitten by the video game bug?

 

Winifred Phillips: Yeah, the bug bit hard!  I’ve always loved video games, so being involved in the process of their creation is a real privilege for me.  Writing music for video games is one of the best jobs a composer can have.  The developers create this enormous playground with all sorts of adventures and spectacles waiting to be discovered, and then as a composer I get to go exploring the fantastic worlds they’ve created.  There is no shortage of inspiration when you’re working on music for a video game!

 

Also, I’ve really been lucky in the projects that have come my way.  God of War was a terrific first project for me, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory came right after it, so I leapt from one amazing adventure to another.  I couldn’t have wished for a better way to enter the business of video games.     

 

How did you come to meet Chadd Portwine (audio director of High Voltage Software) at last year's E3?

 

WP: E3 2004 was incredibly important for me.  The meetings I had there started me off on my career as a video game composer.  I’d exchanged e-mails with a few developers before E3, but there really is no replacement for a face-to-face meeting.

 

Of course, E3 poses its own challenges, what with the huge crowds and the tremendous noise level, not to mention the constant sensory barrage you get from all the flashing lights and monster video screens hanging from the ceiling.  But E3 is the main event of the video game industry, so everyone in the business is there.  People say that E3 is just a marketing show, but to me it [has] been an exciting gathering of developers in an environment that really celebrates their achievements.  E3 is a lot of fun!

 

I’d exchanged e-mails with Chadd Portwine back in January of 2004, and he’d asked me to send him a music demo CD then, which I did.  In April we set up the meeting at E3.  By the way, that was the same E3 at which I first met with Sony Computer Entertainment America about the God of War project.  All in all, it was a really good convention for me!

 

I had a great meeting with Chadd.  We met right outside the Vivendi Universal booth.  That year Vivendi mounted this towering video display arch at the entrance to their booth, which was sort of like a high tech video game version of the Arc De Triomphe, showing enormous images from Vivendi’s recent games, including one developed by Chadd’s company High Voltage Software.  Standing pretty much right under that gigantic arch, Chadd and I had our meeting.  We talked in general terms about music, and how High Voltage integrates it into their games.  He didn’t tell me anything about the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory project during our meeting.  He only said that he had a project coming up in a few months that he thought my abilities would suit well, and that we should keep in touch.  In August he told me that the project was “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” 

 

 

 

Was E3 2005 just as exciting and as eventful for you?

 

WP: Oh yeah!  I got to meet with a lot more developers in 2005 than in 2004, which made for an exhilarating experience.  Some of the developers had created games I’d loved as a kid, so I was really nervous meeting them.  But this time I went into those meetings after having worked on two big games, so all in all I felt a lot more comfortable.

 

I wish I’d had time to look around the exhibit halls while I was there, but my schedule was literally crammed with meetings, so all I did was dash around like mad!  It was an honor to get the opportunity to talk with the people who create games.  This year it felt like there were loads more developers in attendance than there had been in 2004.  Maybe all the big announcements regarding next generation systems attracted the developers to the convention.  The energy at E3 ‘05 reached a whole new level.

 

Please tell us about the game, your soundtrack, and how they are both a part of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory universe.

 

WP: The Charlie and the Chocolate Factory game is literally an opportunity to run around in Tim Burton’s world.  In the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie, Tim Burton created a visually stunning landscape of the imagination, with a truly original take on the environments created by Ronald Dahl in his beloved children’s book.  The game is both a faithful rendering of those fantastic settings, and an elaboration on them as well.

 

In the game you get to see parts of the chocolate factory not shown in the movie.  The Charlie Bucket character also gets to be much more proactive in the game than he is in the movie or the book.  Charlie’s biggest achievement in Ronald Dahl’s story is survival -- he makes it through the factory without getting sucked into the wacky accidents and mishaps that befall the other children.  In the game, Charlie is called upon to save the factory from rampaging robots and machinery gone amuck.  This makes Charlie’s personal story much more focused on action.

 

Creating music for the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory game was a delicate balancing act.  Both Danny Elfman and I were working at the same time to create music for projects based on the same source material that was being shaped and guided by the hand of Tim Burton.  Considering that, I think it was remarkable how much artistic freedom I was given.  I was never asked to imitate the musical choices Danny Elfman was making for the film.  I never heard anything from Elfman’s score for the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie while I was working on the music for the game, other than a small chunk of the marionette’s theme that was used in an early trailer for the movie.

 

Not knowing what Elfman was doing allowed me to apply my own musical interpretation to Tim Burton’s spectacular fantasy world.  High Voltage kept me well supplied with video files captured from the game-in-progress, and the video files were filled with the art design and creativity of Tim Burton’s film.  With these visuals as a foundation, I had the chance to experiment with musical techniques and effects, and the whole experience was incredibly fulfilling!

 

Of course, I’ve always had an incredible admiration for Danny Elfman’s work.  Who among us doesn’t know the Batman movie theme well enough to sing it?  Now that’s a great melody!  I knew that a true musical giant was working on the movie side of this project, but I tried not to be intimidated by that.  The video game side of the project had very unique musical requirements, so a different approach was absolutely necessary.

 

Also, I’d like to think that, generally speaking, my musical sensibilities are not that dissimilar from Elfman’s.  It probably helped that Danny Elfman and I were both using some similar vocal techniques in our work.  The weird part is that we both arrived at the same choices independently.  We both overdubbed our own voices into choral ensembles for use in our music for the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory projects, which made for a strange and wonderful coincidence.

 

It’s true that we’re both vocalists who have used our voices in our work before.  Elfman sang in “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and as the front man for his band “Oingo Boingo.”  I sang in “God of War” and in my music for dramas on National Public Radio and XM Satellite Radio.  I suppose it’s very natural to use your own voice in your music if you are a composer who also happens to be a singer.  Still, I think the use of vocals in that way made for a wonderful symmetry between the game score and the movie score, and I’m very glad it happened the way it did.

 

It's interesting that Tim Burton wanted to be involved with the music for the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory game.  That's not very common for licensed software.  Did this have a negative or positive effect on your ideas, the timeframe, etc.?

 

WP: Tim Burton was definitely involved in the game creation process, as was the movie studio, Warner Bros.  I think this involvement was crucial.  The Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie is filled with marvelous strangeness – a marriage of gothic and carnival elements, all wrapped up in candy wrapper cellophane.  It was this very unique and personal take on the Ronald Dahl story that gave the movie its identity, and if the game didn’t also reflect the gloriously weird style inherent in the film, it wouldn’t have truly belonged in Tim Burton’s universe.

 

That being said, Tim Burton’s involvement in the music for the game was only in regard to giving his approvals of the tracks, and he liked everything I did.  He approved everything.  So in that way Tim Burton provided me with a tremendous amount of emotional and artistic support during the process, and I was immensely grateful for that. 

 

 

 

Who decided what you could write for this game?  It's a game that's based on a movie that's based on a novel, which could be open to many interpretations.  Were you able to decide which direction should be taken, or were there specific requests from the developers and/or Tim Burton?

 

WP: At the beginning of the project I received some very general direction from High Voltage and Warner Bros., mostly relating to the need for the music to have an orchestral sound, and for the quirkiness of the settings to come through in the music.  Apart from those general directives, I was given free rein to experiment and create.

 

The source material was incredibly inspiring.  As soon as I found out I’d be working on the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory project, I immediately re-read the book by Ronald Dahl.  It’s a wildly imaginative story.  Dahl balances zany antics with magical wonders, and in reading the book I saw the need for the music to do the same thing.  The music had to marry both the crazy mishaps and the awesome spectacles into one cohesive sound that had elements of both.  Dahl’s story also radiates with warmth and heart, which I knew would be very important to the score.

 

Tim Burton’s interpretation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a faithful adaption of the Ronald Dahl story, which made it vital to understand and express the emotions and energy that were in Dahl’s written version.  Fortunately for me, I had a wealth of source materials to rely on!  Dahl’s book, Burton’s masterful interpretation as reflected in the game’s faithful visual style, and High Voltage’s infusion of inventive puzzles, action and exploration were all plentiful sources of inspiration.

 

I've heard about the original choral music you wrote for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, tell us more about that.  Where did the inspiration come from for this sound?

 

WP: It’s been my experience that there is nothing quite so expressive as the human voice.  I’d used choral passages in previous projects to create ethereal and epic effects, and in doing so I found that no other tool at a composer’s disposal is even half as expressive or communicative as a choir.

 

But if I was going to use choir for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I knew that my approach had to be very unique and unconventional.  I limited myself to a female choir for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  I liked the lighter touch inherent in the sound.  I also liked the tenderness and warmth that a female choir can lend to a melody – the magical and lyric nature of a group of sopranos singing in unison cannot be matched by anything else.  There were endless possibilities in the way a female choir could be used for this project, for both somber and comical purposes.  It turned out to be an extraordinarily flexible instrument able to accomplish an endless variety of sounds and effects. 

 

Explain the complex choral technique you used.

 

WP: Usually there were twelve to sixteen female voices present in any choir passage.  Since I performed all the vocals myself, I would record these choir sections by overdubbing my own voice twelve to sixteen times.  In terms of the technique, there were two basic delineations in the way in which the female choir was used.  The first was the more gentle, melodic use of the choir.  Singing on open vowels like ‘Ah’ or ‘Oh,’ the choir would perform three part harmonies in the middle register to add warmth to an orchestration, or would soar above the orchestra in counterpoint to the melodies carried by the strings or horns.

 

One of the most difficult aspects of this technique was the complete absence of vibrato in the voice – that characteristic vibration that naturally occurs when someone is singing.  The technique of singing without vibrato lends an innocent quality to the tone, a beautiful simplicity which can only be obtained without the vibration.  It does make performing the vocals much more difficult, however.

 

The second technique was used in the faster, up-tempo comic tracks in the game.  There were lots of ways to convey the crazy comic energy that these tracks needed with instruments of the orchestra, but they all might have felt overly silly.  I was walking a fine line, balancing zany antics with magical wonders, and the danger was in crossing the line in either direction.

 

So in the end I let the female choir do the comedy.  I recorded fast ‘scat-like’ vocal performances with the full sixteen-voice choir singing nonsense syllables like ‘bada ba dum bum’ and ‘da dee da dee da.’  Sometimes the voices sang together in three part harmonies, sometimes they were performing short precision accent chords, and sometimes all three parts were performing wild independent counterpoint lines at opposite ends of their vocal range.  In at least one or two tracks I was singing rhythms that were machine-gun fast.

 

I didn’t use any technology to speed up these performances, because if I had, I think the resulting vocals would have sounded a little too perfect – they would have lost that frantic, comedic energy they needed to support the action of the game.  So I just took a deep breath and sang those rapid fire vocal parts until I was blue in the face.  It was really difficult and a lot of fun at the same time.  I wasn’t trying to sing the parts comedically – I tried to sing them as seriously as I could.  I think this lent a softer edge to the craziness, resulting in mayhem of a kinder, gentler variety.  All in all this technique worked well, I think – it suited the feel of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory game. 

 

In only one place in the game, I abandoned both approaches and went full-tilt operatic.  This was for the final level of the game.  I’d written the music with a very dramatic orchestral feel, and it simply screamed for a classical vocal approach.  So I just went for it and sang it full-throated with lots of vibrato.  If you listen closely, you’ll hear one point in the track where there is some subtle comedy involved in this, when the choir begins singing “La la la la la” with operatic fervor.

 

Is this a technique you've used before or plan to use again?

 

WP: Some of these techniques I’d never used before working on this project.  I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone else use a technique like the fast nonsense syllable approach I used -- at least not in quite the same way.  That was one of the reasons why working on this project was such a fulfilling experience -- I got the opportunity to try things that I’d never tried before.  I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to use that technique again, but who knows?  If another project calls for it, I’m up for the challenge. 

 

 

 

How were the diverse sounds that you speak of achieved?  Was it done digitally, with a full orchestra, or…?

 

WP: I worked with computers, keyboards and acoustic instrument samples to achieve the orchestral sound of the musical score.  It takes a lot of time, patience and attention to detail to bring together a collection of instrument samples and use them in just the right way to make them sound like a full orchestra.  You’d be surprised at how many film scores are being written in this manner nowadays.  While it is nice to work with a live orchestra, I think working with a virtual orchestra is the true proving ground for a modern composer.

 

As always, I worked with award-winning music producer Winnie Waldron on this project.  In addition to producing and directing the vocal sessions, Winnie ensured that the quality of the music remained high throughout the music production process.  It is a real blessing to work with someone whose opinion and judgment you implicitly trust.  Winnie has been a constant with me since our days at National Public Radio.  She has an uncanny ability to know when something works musically and when it doesn’t.  What’s even better, she knows this right away.  As soon as a problem occurs, she’s raising the red flag on it, which makes the whole process of troubleshooting and revising much faster.   

 

What is your favorite part of composing music?  What is your favorite part (a specific song, a specific part of a song, etc.) of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory soundtrack?

 

WP: My favorite part of composing music is always changing.  Sometimes I love working with the rhythmic elements, the complexities and the momentum that makes rhythm infectious.  Other times I love writing a simple melody or harmonic progression – especially one that comes as an unexpected surprise, taking the piece of music in a new direction.  Discovering one of those can be a lot of fun.  I love exploring a genre of music that is new to me – it gives me an excuse to listen to new and different music and try to get inside the heads of the artists and composers who make it great.  I have an intense love-hate relationship with beginning any piece of music that explores a particularly unknown territory for me.  I’m always full of doubt at the beginning.  I swing from frustration to excitement in the middle, and (if all goes well) I’m elated at the end.

 

My favorite part of writing music for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was the chance to create a vocabulary of musical themes for characters and situations, which taken together form a sort of musical language that belongs exclusively to the game.  I’ve heard gamers talk about playing a game for so long that they get into a sort of Zen state, when the controller and the interface disappear and they’re able to get mentally inside the game.  Sometimes I felt like that when I was working on this project.

 

At times a musical theme would suggest itself to me when I wasn’t working, and I’d have to go scribble it down before it was gone.  Bits of melody built themselves up over the course of the project until I had this large vocabulary to work with, and then I didn’t really feel like I was writing music at all – I felt like I was telling Charlie’s story.  It was a very Zen feeling.  All the elements came together and now the game feels like it has a real musical identity.  I know that wouldn’t have been possible without such richly textured source material as Tim Burton’s film and Ronald Dahl’s book.  Both sources inspired the designers of the game which in turn inspired me.  I’m proud to have been a part of this project. 

 

Can we expect more game soundtracks from you in the near future?

 

WP: Absolutely.  I have several projects in the works, but I’m not at liberty to discuss them yet.  They’re still in the early stages.  I’m having a great time in the game industry!  I’m looking forward to creating music for video games for a long time to come.

Winifred Phillips

www.winifredphillips.com