Oh, dead blog! Big surprise.

I'm now much more active on Facebook, with actual music being posted much more often. Click my page and become a fan! (you know you want to)

I miss a place where I can bitch about stuff and upset the douchebags who still read me eventhough they hate me. But I do bitch a little on Facebook, so go ahead!

Magnetis trailer online

Magnetis Wii trailer from Yullaby on Vimeo.

F-Zero cover

Here's a quick cover of my favorite F-Zero tune, Port Town. Play it LOUD:

Port Town Mojo

You can also check my Facebook page (and hopefully become a fan! :)
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nino-Mojo/176919580012?ref=nf

Daniel Benmergui's and Gregory Weir's games

They're awesome, and you're not.

These two little gems are kind of like Jason Rohrer's games Passage and Gravitation, but cuter!

Try I wish I Were The Moon, and Story Teller by Daniel Benmergui.

Now try I Fell In Love With The Majesty Of Colors, from Gregory Weir. If that's not brilliance, I don't know what this is.



I would just like to troll a little bit on the fact that I'm sure most people, especially a lot of game designers, won't see the "point" of these games, or say they aren't games at all, or they will simply not understand "the hype". I pity them, because that's exactly why this industry looks so retarded to the rest of the world. These experimental little gems do more to advance the medium to a truly mature form than anything you will come up with in your next action game.

Okay, you might not toy for more than five minutes with them, but for me it was a very worthy five minutes, since I feel tremendously inspired by these tiny things. And now I feel compelled to make my own.

The very cool thing with indy games, is that they still have a freedom long lost by mainstream game developers: name their game something interesting, or intriguing, or even meaningful sometimes. I Wish I Were The Moon, I Fell In Love With The Majesty Of Colors, And Yet It Moves, Seven Minutes, Seven Days a Stranger... Those are interesting titles that make me want to find out what the game hides in its heart. They're intriguing, so by the moment you hear them your brain is already working trying to figure out why they're nammed like that, so in a sense, these games already respect you although you haven't played them yet.

Mainstream developers are condemned, perhaps forever, to try and fit a product descption into their game titles. What a pityful place we're in. I want to do art games. ;_;

Edge awarded Best Mobile Game of 2008 !

I'll say more about this later. But basically a while ago I wrote some music, together with Simon Périn, for the most incredible mobile game in the world, Edge, by Mobigame. The game was nominated forBest Mobile Game of 2008 at the french Festival Du Jeu Vidéo 2008, and it won. So yay. More on that later, I'm preparing for my trip to Portugal this week. I'll be back in a week with more awesomeness. See ya !

Wild Casting is out! (but bleh)

Back from Annecy 2008 - Catastrophic Sound Design & Amazing Encounters

Wild Casting is one of the five 30 seconds shorts made by 2nd year students at Les Gobelins, the prestigious french animation school. It was screened on June 11th before every screening at the Festival d'Annecy 2008 that occured that day. I composed the music for it. So big joy, because it's the first time my music made it to the big screen !

Wild Casting - Chase
Wild Casting - Credits

The downside is that the people in charge of the sound design and the final mix did, objectively, a very poor job (and those weren't students, but supposedly pros, go figure...) The team was very disappointed because the audio does very bad service to the film, and I am disappointed because you can barely hear my work. The team and I agreed that I will junk their audio, do new sound effects and re-mix my music myself so they can have a version of the film that serves their initial vision, one we can be proud of. Apparently, it's not the first time a student short from Les Gobelins has its team in discontent because the same audio people appointed by the school fail to serve their intentions and ruin the film. So "seeing" my music for the first time in a theater with people cheering and applauding was both amazing and heart-crushingly unpleasant, which is awkward. (I know, you're thinking I'm just never satisfied...)

You can still (try to) enjoy the movie in its festival release here, while I cook up a (hopefully) much better version of the audio.

The young people who did this film are amazing, Jérémie, Floriane, Thomas and the others all kick ass and it was a thrill working with such talented artists (and be able to visit the school, which I always dreamed of, as a kid I wanted to study there and become a cartoonist!). Now to more amazing stuff.

Many people thought this year's festival kind of sucked. I can't say because it was the first time I went so I rather enjoyed it. I saw a few cool films (Bill Plympton's Idiots & Angels was wicked, La Maison en Petits Cubes was simply wonderful), I met some interesting folks, and Annecy is a town so beautiful it's simply from another world. The feeling that perplexed me the most is that it felt so "right" for me to be in an animation festival, more right than E3 ever felt (ok, that's easy). Maybe because, for once, I was around people who for the most care truly about the meaning of the things they do. (Yes, I'm looking at you with those mean eyes, video games industry).

There was a small exhibition in honor of Richard Williams' 75th birthday, and I could see originals from Who Framed Roger Rabbit ? (which I consider to be one of the truly most amazing films ever made, tremendously influential to me). It reminded me the funny fact that when I got Roger Rabbit on VHS (I was 9 or 10), I literally ruined the tape because I would watch the entire film in slow motion so I could decompose the animations and reproduce them in one of my million flip books. The film was going most of the time at 1/4 of its normal frame rate, it would sometime take the afternoon to run through and I would do that over and over again, the way kids only can be obsessed.


Roger Rabbit's animations are probably the ones I decomposed the most, together with a couple of Tom & Jerry cartoons I had taped (from La Dernière Séance, if you're French. :) I was stunned at how fluid and "volumetric" everything was in Roger Rabbit, I was in awe of the physics. A few years later, at age 16, I did the same with Toy Story, on VHS too, which fucked the tape too. :) When DVD players hit the market, it was like I was GOD. It's hard to believe I became a composer with a childhood so obsessed with drawing animation.

If you went to the Annecy 2008 it's impossible you missed the hype around them: the people from Blue Sky were there! Chhuy-Ing's friend Gerald had such a network of acquaintances that somehow we got introduced to them (like hundreds of people anyway, because they were here to recruit artists so they weren't shy of giving business cards and handshakes by the dozen).

The thing that's most amazing is that one of them somehow enjoyed our company and spent the whole freaking day with us, just hanging out. I'm talking about William Frake. The guy was sweet, probably in his 50's, and a little hard to follow when talking sometimes (20% French and 5% German thrown here and there in every sentence he makes). :) So hey, here we are talking and somehow I throw in the conversation that my favorite animated movie ever is Iron Giant, and the guy goes "Oh great, I worked on this". He told me a bit about the experience of working with people like Brad Bird, apparently it was one of his favorite projects ever. So I spent some quality time talking with a guy who knows Brad Bird, is good friend with Robert Zemeckis, who worked on Ice Age, Roger Rabbit, Iron Giant, and is the father of Scrat and an apprentice of the nine old men (the last of them died this year sadly). The guy, if I remember correctly, worked on Toon Town... Oh my god, I need to say it again, the guy did FUCKING TOON TOWN.

I didn't want to let the conversation to be only about animation and how great he was and how his friends Bird and Zemeckis were among the only people on earth who are still able to reach to my grownup heart with their films, I didn't want to lick his pants too much (but I had to, a little:). But I still got a few very valuable opinions and stories from him, that I will chew for some time to come for sure.

Someone asked the guy why he was hanging out with us humble artists walking by the lake, in a crowded festival when there was an ocean of animation celebrities, producers and cocky executives at MIFA just 500 meters away, and he replied something you must guess I enjoyed tremendously: "My life is people like you".

Horse Life is out!

All downloadable music in this post is protected under copyright from Neko Entertainment & myself and presented here for self-promotion purposes with kind authorization from Neko Entertainment.

Music for the Nintendo DS

Download MP3 excerpts from Horse Life:
> Building Trust
> A New Friend
> Like The Wind!
> We Did It!
> Epilogue

If you happen to have used the parisian metro sometime this week, you might have noticed an ad for the DS game on the picture below.

Well, I made the music for this one! I composed 21 different songs for this game, and only 3 of which to be ashamed of! :) (which is a surprisingly small number :). The style is somewhat country but not really, everything is driven by harmonica and violin, supported by piano and guitar. I kind of grew uninspired towards the end of the project, hence the 3 ill-conceived and repetitive songs I mentioned. :) This is a modest game, made by smaller companies and scored by a smaller composer. But nevertheless, this project is important to me. Why? Because I think it's the very first time, at least in some years, that I've scored a video game with the client letting me be absolutely free. I could decide how many cues were needed, what style to chose, what pace to give to each cue.

If you're reading this and you're not a professional composer yourself, you might think "Well, isn't that just normal? Is it not what they pay you for?". Heck, YES it should be like this, but sadly it's been rarer and rarer to be able to work this way since a few years, for reasons I've been ranting about way too much lately (but let's not forget that collaboration with knowledgeable and sensitive producers can be a truly great experience sometimes). But this time, it happened: I was 100% on my own to create a entire game soundtrack with nobody interfering. It was probably for the wrong reasons though, but it happened anyway and the outcome is simply this: I think it's the best work I've done for a video game in a long time.

Since no one was interfering, it made a world of difference. I would start working on a piece, and sometimes even after a full minute of finished music was done I would notice it wasn't right for the corresponding moment in the game and I would start over on my own, I would spot my mistakes myself and fix them in an informed and creative manner, before some executive would try to make his own piece of music by using my body as a vessel.

The songs, while not being the finest pieces of music in the world, work really well while you're playing I think, which is my absolute primary goal when working on a game. This is why, eventhough the music isn't necessarily the best I've ever done, I think I succeeded in creating a good GAME soundtrack.

Thanks to good, up-to-date coding practices, I could make changes to the game's audio without programmers even being aware of it , and without endangering the project until up to the last minute before the master was compiled and sent to the client.

The client, Neko Entertainment, was nice enough to allow me to share the music on the internet once the game would be released! Quick facts if you're not familiar with the technical aspect of video game music:

• - Everything is made 100% using Nintendo's NitroSoundMaker, the native DS music sequencing format (.SDAT). Which means it sounds a bit like "MIDI" music, it's not CD or MP3 quality. The music you hear is actually being performed in real time by the Nintendo DS (The client still thought it was MP3 until very far in the development course:).
  
  
• - As usual with any kind of sequenced music I programmed and sampled all the instruments myself and by hand, this is where being a former Amiga musician came in handy. On the song called "Like The Wind!", pay attention to the piano and the guitard chords, getting "midi" instruments to sound like that took me countless hours. I learned a few valuable tricks along the way, and my next DS soundtrack will be only better.
  
  
• - My greatest triumph here: The whole sound archive for this game fits in a little less than 700 KB (all 50 sound effects included). There are just a couple environmental streams stored as well on the cartridge but they're not part of the sound archive.

I hope you like them! This is only the beginning, this is only "gotta-eat" stuff. Right now the team and I are working on some MUCH more interesting stuff. Stuff that will perhaps finally allow me to show off a little bit in terms of interactive sound design. More in a few months, I hope.

Mieux vaut tard que jamais !

This modest corner is what I like to call "Studio Mojo" :)

It doesn't look like much but there's still a couple keyboards missing because of an obvious lack of room. I am so happy these days, you just can't beat that. I'm still extremely confident that I made the right choice leaving my golden cage at Gameloft. Some great things will be made around this desk, I know it!

So it's fashionable at the moment to blog about Resident Evil 5's trailer being "racist". So here's my 2 cents about that.

As usual, the overall response and the opinions expressed by video game players themselves are mostly pathetic, and make me feel lucky that those same persons do not debate publicly about politics.

Now, each time someone has to say anything negative about a video game, they fall in the "conservative mothers" category without any further thinking applied to the problem. The argument that this polemic shouldn't even be because there hasn't been one with other games or trailer featuring equally "shocking" content is ludicrous.

If there's anything Capcom often lacks, it's definitely taste (I'm refering to their abusive use of western pop-culture cliches in almost everything they do). To think that some people claim that there is nothing to feel insulted about in this trailer leaves me in awe.

People, it's really time to get a brain for yourself, and a heart while you're at it. There is a simple question that suffices to understand the whole matter and to help thinking reasonnably about it. Ask yourself:

If Africa was as big a market for video games as the US, would Capcom have been more careful ?

Deep down, you know the answer is an unequivocal YES. And that's where everyone should stop at.

-

2 new games I worked on:

(Warning: some views expressed in this post might get you bitching, it depends on how idiotic you are)

*Download midi mobile phone music from Holy Wars below:
- Holy Wars: Battle

- Gordes Town

- World map

- The Forest (my personal favorite)

I totally forgot about this, but Holy Wars: Sons of Enoch is out, and so is the first ever video game adaptation of Oban Star Racers! Actually they've been out for a little while now but I was to busy working on my next project (which is 99.9% complete now) to recall that I actually worked on something else.

Holy Wars: Sons of Enoch
Beat'em All/RPG, nice blend of both, good graphics and cool fighting mechanics.

And Oban Star Racers

Racing game from the TV animated series. The game is cool but a bit too hard for me. (Maybe I just suck?). Anyway it looks terrific, if you liked the show you have to play this one. If you don't know the show you have to watch it.

Both games look sweet, don't they ?

So, yeah... They're both mobile games so there's not a whole lot of improvement here compared to my previous condition. :) These babies were developped and published by Devalley Entertainment. But actually, working on them was quite different than working on Gameloft games, which I 'm going to say a word about in a minute. But first, a kind word about Devalley, because they deserve it.

If you play with your cellphone sometimes (and I mean running games on it :)), you have to try Devalley games. This studio isn't famous (yet?) but has been around for a little while now. Their games are the first ones on mobile that really had me say "Ha! Now THAT's easy to pick up!". They're incredibly easy to play and fun, the frame rame is always good, the graphics are nice and the storylines are wacko. Everybody who thinks Gameloft or EA Mobile make great action games should try Gun Fever. Devalley's sudoku game "Sudoku QI Training" is amazing too, and I've been playing it each time I went to the bathroom for the past 2 months (honest). The company is small and dedicated to the love of gaming. Their games are amazingly quick to pick up and it takes no more than a couple of seconds to save your game and quit it whenever you need to. There are keys to press at anytime in the game that save your progress or turn the sound ON/OFF, without the need to go browsing in tiresome and laggy menus (*cough* Gameloft *cough* :)).

Edit: I deleted the rest of the article because I realized its content was downright insulting to a lot of people who didn't deserve it (that much). I'm sorry.

!!!Freedom!!!

Tonight I'm finally free from Gameloft. A couple of people there must be litterally pooping their pants from happiness. :) I can assure them then the joy is shared.

I guess I'm not realizing yet. But the nice thing is that from start to finish, I didn't have one single moment of hesitation before resigning. There was no time where I hesitated or thought to myself: "perhaps I should reconsider, this is a very nice position with a high salary and comfort". Nope. I did it, and now it's done and that I officially don't have any other revenue and have to live on my life savings, I'm very confident I made the right choice and I'm not scared one bit about the future.

BRING ON THE FUTURE !

We had this amazing little good-bye party on the shore of the Seine river here in beautiful Paris, 20 people showed up and we rocked. They made me the most totally rad gift, both excellent and amazingly annoying. For the sake of decency I can't say what it is exactly, but let's just say it will be a great reminder of the people I loved the "most" there, so I never forget why was everything this way. Guys, you rock :)

Playing with a simple line

Don't pay attention to the stupid "waveform" image above, it's just there trying to be pretty. Here's a bit of totally useless messing around with music, with story telling in mind (as always for me).

Tonight I felt like playing a bit with the woodwinds. Here's a simple line of oboe (which is of course copyrighted and that you should NOT rip to use anywhere else:)):
1-Oboe

Then I added a bit of piano to kind of "cue" the Oboe melody, and a bit of harp in the background. It starts to sound a bit like a mother/child relation ship to me :)
2-oboe+piano+harp

Here I tried to replace the harp by a gentle celesta part, it now sounds a bit as if the scene was more set in childhood (but obviously the focus wouldn't be the child itself or else I would swap the oboe for a "cuter" lead; so the result sounds more like "childhood" than "child" to me.
3-oboe+piano+celesta

So finally I droped the celeste and re-put the harp instead for more "readability" and a warmer sound. I droped the piano as well and I doubled the oboe with a flute and finally added a simple part of backing strings chords to make the result sound "fuller" and more emotional (the string section is the most emotional tool in the whole orchestra I guess). Ho by the way: flute + harp = pure magic ! (easy I know but it works just so well).
4-oboe+flute+harp+strings

I think the flute and oboe playing in unison just sound so wonderful, they have such a strong narrative power ! And I intend to use this combination a lot. :)

It's past 2 in the morning and I would really like to build a true "tiny tutorial of basic orchestration for dummies" right now, but tomorrow I have to go to my faaking job, where I feel as useless as an unijambist in an ass-kicking contest. I'm always thinking that maybe when I have the guts to quit I'll have more time to put my back into music and orchestration and my piano lessons a lot more, but I know I'm gonna end up doing everything but that... Still playing too much Mame and trying to improve my BlitzBasic skills (for the good of the world though! :)). I'm just so depressed right now.

I'd rather kill myself than live a whole life knowing that I never was the composer I wanted to be. I have to convince myself all again that this is what I do, this is what I am, a composer. But the last five years at Lameloft really had a negative impact on my self-confidence and actual ability I guess. Anyway nobody ever reads the bullshit I write here, but it just feels somewhat relieving to write it down :)



Everything but the piano => Garritan Personal Orchestra

Piano => Malmsjo Piano from Artvista (which is my secret weapon for a convincing orchestra/piano mix with no effort)

Blown away...

Even more New York photos

Doesn't this look kind of Bladerunner-ish ? (I'd hope so:)). I don't know which version is the best, horizontal or vertical ? I have deep love for very wide images.





This one was of course taken in China Town. -->

Some more NYC photographs - Grand Central

Look what I just got !

Mama !

New York City II (September 2005)

Here are other pictures i took while in New York City last September. What's nice when you are on the top of the Empire State Building is that you don't get the smell from there.

New York City (September 2005)

A few pictures from my business-then-holiday trip to big apple, last September.
I don't have a camera, so I used my girlfriend's one. She'll always let me take the pictures, not because she thinks I'm better than her at this, but because she's somewhat too lazy to take too many pictures a day :)