Battlefront II voice over performer Janina Gavankar catches up with Star Wars composer Gordy Haab over at Grok Nation to discuss his Star Wars musical journey.
JG: I know! Okay, okay. Alright. So, now you get a call to do Battlefront II. What information are you given before you start composing? Are you told the general idea of the story?
GH: Battlefront II has two parts, basically: There’s the multiplayer side of the game, and then there’s the single-player campaign, which was much more intensive from a musical standpoint than the multi-player because it was story-driven. So, I had a very early script when I started writing music. For a video game, the composer typically comes on in the middle of the schedule, whereas for a film, they come in at the very end, usually looking at an edited picture and writing music to the picture. At the point that I started writing, I still had no visuals. So I was just going off of the script.
JG: That’s crazy! Did they even tell you who was playing who or anything?
GH: I didn’t know that until about a month into the writing process. And I purposely stayed away from writing anything that had to do with Iden until I knew who was playing the role, until I had some visuals, and until I was able to really fully understand the arc of the character, because it’s so important that that theme is able to translate through multiple emotions, since that’s the biggest arc in the storyline. But for other characters, for more static characters like Garrick, Iden’s father, I wrote those themes first. And then Iden’s theme was actually somewhat of a variation on Garrick’s theme, but it has more of an upreaching, ascending shape to it.
