Overheard at Billy Elliot, Imperial Theatre, 5/28/09
During intermission, right rear orchestra, seat Q9:
$4 for water. That’s crazy!
Monthly Archive for May, 2009
The website for our upcoming iPhone game collaboration with Ben Britten is now live. Check out snowferno.com for details, screenshots, development blog, and hear some clips from the soundtrack.
You’ve heard the saying — but where did it all begin?
Who was that snowball, and what exactly was it doing in Hell?Snowferno is a new take on the classic marble roller game – set (very) loosely in the 9 rings of Dante’s Inferno, with 20 puzzle challenges & starring the original “Snowball-in-Hell”.
Programming and artwork are by Ben. Mike and I are writing the music and designing (most of) the levels. We are nearing a beta release and hope to hit the iTunes App Store early July.
Dan O’Neill writes a great article for the upcoming production of Mike’s “Through A Glass, Darkly” by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington DC.
- Singing Through the Silence of Crystal Meth Addiction
–Dan O’Neill, dc.bilerico.com, May 8, 2009
Our Live Entertainment projects for this year include “Survivor: Live”, created by two longtime partners of FatLab Music — RWS & Associates Entertainment, Inc. and Joey Wartnerchaney of Manhattan Creative Group — and scored by me.
RWS, under agreement with CBS Television, is producing the first-ever live entertainment adaptation of the Emmy Award-winning television series, and I was thrilled to contribute the music.
The show centers around physical challenges with audience volunteers. For the show, I wrote an expanded theme song adapted from Russ Landau’s iconic “Ancient Voices”, plus arranged all-new tribal/hip-hop versions of “369“, M.I.A.’s “Galang“, and Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor“.
Two parks open their productions today — Denver’s Elitch Gardens and Oklahoma City’s Frontier City — with Buffalo’s Darien Lake to follow May 23. Performances are four times daily thru the end of each park’s summer season.
Related:
- CBS stages live show for ‘Survivor’ –Variety.com 3/23/09
- Interactive ‘Survivor: Live’ stage show hits theme parks –Entertainment Weekly 3/24/09
As I wrote previously, Rogue Amoeba’s just-released iPhone app “Airfoil Speakers Touch” is a slightly baffling piece of software with limited use in practice. I don’t think much of the criticism it is getting on the iTunes App Store is their fault tho, and the upcoming 3.0 SDK features may let Rogue Amoeba finally create what users think this app will do (and what they really want — Airfoil for iPhone!). But, for now, it’s baffling.
As a composer embarking on scoring my first iPhone game, however, I now see a tremendous use for this. Our audio system has great studio speakers, but iPhone music has to be optimized for audibility over the tiny phone speaker as well. Instead of the laborious “export, mp3, copy to iTunes, sync, iPod play” routine, I can simply hijack Live or DP and beam the audio to my phone. Tweaks made on-the-fly are immediately heard.
A phone call will still interrupt the audio with no option to resume, and I still can’t control the host from within the app… but it did just make my workflow much simpler.
