Above: Crew of 5 Crash Landing. Animation by JEREMY VICKERY

Above.  "The Trail to the City of Titan Frigate". From Left: Larrisa Kasian, Kenneth Sears, and Bronstone Delone. Picture by Sung Kim.

Music Playing: "The Standoff" Home World Original Score by John Vincent McCauley

Home World a Rhino Motion Production.

Creating a Sonic World Through The Power of Music and Sound Design.

For Home World I was assigned as composer and sound designer which provided a great opportunity to fully create a cohesive sonic experience.  I have always been a fan of composers who create scores that are rich and provide a sensory experience beyond the explicit melody, and take the audience to another place.  The story was mostly dark, and contained elements including alien illusions, human clones, flashbacks, uncertainty of timeline, paranoia, and a lost race. It became clear to me as we got into the rough score, that the director (Phillip Hudson) really did not want a classic brass intensive sci fi score and instead  wanted the score palette to contain ethnic wind and string instruments, piano, percussion, and ambient  dark sound design  to fully represent the sound palette and support the story (based in the year 3037).  

For the planet surface and most of the spot cues, I created many layers of music and sound design. The layers often were a mixture of orchestral, authentic eastern wind and string instruments (Yalli Tambur and Duduk), and synth beds. Many of the orchestral cues were strings and subtle brass layered with synth pads, and  sub sonic pads to provide for a deep and rich bottom end polish to the orchestra sound.  I am very inspired by counter melodies, the main title theme would not have worked in my opinion without the Yalli Tambur/Duduk counter lines that enter at about 54 seconds "For Humanity". Some of the other cues were heavy piano and strings with counter, including "Mourning Captain" and "Burial of 'Innocence".

The sound design that created the audio sensation of space and the setting of a distant planet was a mix of non tonal fx and rich pads with musical tone. They were created using mostly synth beds with much dynamic movement across the very low end (50-80khz) as well as high end, including some subtle vocal FX to add elements of breathing and ghostly voices (note how this is mixed in with the main title). The vocal performances included Gregorian chants, men's choir, boy's choir, and Syrian female solo vocals. For the clone flashback scenes, to create a sense of time change I switched from authentic orchestral instruments to ambient synth strings and water like transparent sound design, the boys chorus added the final chilling touch.  See "Clones before Us" .

John