When approached by production/VFX house Psyop, New York, and its in-house agency Establishment for the Greater Good (EGG) to score a piece on malaria prevention in disadvantaged countries, composer/sound designer Drazen Bosnjak of NY-based Q Department said he and his team were immediately on board.
To contribute to work for the Against Malaria Foundation that promotes “the greater good while working with EGG and Psyop, companies we’ve enjoyed collaborating with in the past, was too great an opportunity to pass up,” related Bosnjak. “We’ve worked with Psyop around since the beginning of Q Department so it goes back some time. They’ve blown me away with amazing, beautiful, different, interesting work. Over the years they have influenced many people at design and animation shops around the world. If you’re a composer and sound designer, it can be magical and beautiful to work with animation as an art form. By contrast, when you get rough cuts from live-action directors, it is rich with sonic elements–cars screeching, bees buzzing, something going on. Animation is totally different. It’s mute which is basically kind of freaky. There’s nothing in terms of audio which makes for a great creative challenge–to invent a world of sound to accompany the visuals.”
The visuals in the piece, which is titled “Nightmare: Malaria,” were constructed to tell an animated tale “without an ending” about a princess who “needs defending.” This little girl is tucked into bed and proceeds to have a lovely dream replete with wondrous creatures big and small. However one creature, a mosquito that casts a giant shadow, takes the idyllic dream into a dark world. The child becomes the insect’s prey and the environment turns from a wonderland to a journey through the girl’s bloodstream which becomes “a deadly river” spreading fever and convulsions.
Sadly this nightmare is “a worldwide threat” continues the storyteller (voiceover by actress Susan Sarandon). Happily, though, it can be simply solved with a $3 net. Netting around the bed keeps mosquitoes away. “It’s such a small thing to buy so millions like the princess will not die.”
Bosnjak recalled a conversation with Psyop director Marie Hyon, who teamed with Marco Spier to helm “Nightmare: Malaria.” “She had a great suggestion as to how to look at the structure of the piece,” assessed Bosnjak. “She advised that we break down the piece of music in the middle and destroy it. The score becomes an ominous slab of sound transitioning from the outside world to the virus getting inside your body and attacking internal organs.”
Dual platforms
The score for the film was in a sense just a starting point for Bosnjak and his compatriots at Q Department. “We were able to take our work and adapt it for another medium,” he said, explaining that the sound elements were then incorporated into a Psyop video game for the Against Malaria Foundation.
“The sound in the video game was produced out of the material done as the score for the film–both the music and sound design,” related Bosnjak. “We approached the original public service project as simply a short film. Then to be able to turn that into another medium was what made this project especially interesting. Combining film and digital elements, being able to create a coherent cross platform experience was a great creative opportunity. Our music and sound design became part of and contributed to the immersive experience of the video game. Your work takes on a whole new life, one in which players are interacting with what you’ve done.
“We refined elements in the film and brought them to the game,” continued Bosnjak. “We came up with deep guttural sounds of internal organs which are being destroyed–just as we intentionally destroyed our music when the malaria virus attacks the girl’s body. The sound design of our film score was used in the video game. We worked with Psyop in creating audio palettes for the experience of game playing. We sequenced the game with our sound. I have to credit the Psyop video game team. It can be really scary for a creative person to leave the work to the tech people. In this particular case, though, Psyop’s people who put the game together had a great sense of programming sounds, helping to put the right sounds in the right places, enhancing how people interact with the game.”
To have a game connect people with how destructive malaria is, to help people to understand the disease is incredibly worthwhile, noted Bosnjak. “The video game extends the shelf life of your work with people playing the game and being engaged by it. That made the project all the more rewarding for us at Q Department.”
The challenges the game poses for players include having to survive 21 levels of fever-dream visuals through two worlds: Blood and brain. Players try to avoid killer mosquitoes and collect teddy bear tokens amid feverish visions. The journey is a visually rich, sometimes enjoyable yet at the same time disturbing experience.
Bosnjak added that it was especially gratifying to work with actress Sarandon whom he has long admired. “Her tone of voice, her reading of the copy is simply amazing. She tuned in and absolutely killed it.”
Q Department also handled the audio post mix in tandem with Josh Abbey of Color, New York, who served as mixer on Sarandon’s voiceover.
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