The Music Of Telling Lies An Interview With Composer Nainita Desai

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The Music Of Telling Lies An Interview With Composer Nainita Desai

Anyone who has played Sam Barlow's Telling Lies will have no doubt been swept away by Nainita Desai's score. She spoke with us about her process. Anyone who has played Sam Barlow's incredible will have no doubt been swept away by Nainita Desai's fantastic score. Moments of discovery are core to the Telling Lies experience, and each time the player makes forward progression, the music swells up and tells them they're on the right track. It's an incredibly effective presentation that adds so much to the cinematic quality of the game. We spoke with Nainita about how the music came to be, what it was like working with Sam, and the details of the score that make it such a unique and effective story telling device in the game. THEGAMER VIDEO OF THE DAY Nainita was uniquely qualified to compose the music for Telling Lies. Not only did she get her start creating sound effects and music for video games, she also has a degree in mathematics - a background that was certainly useful when working on a non-linear game as technically challenging as Telling Lies. Nainita has been working on Telling Lies with Director Sam Barlow from the very beginning. 3 years ago, Sam contacted Nainita on Twitter and asked if she would be interested in the project. Nainita jumped at the opportunity: "For me, that was like a dream come true. I just love new forms of story telling and new ways of engaging audiences and getting stories out to people in fresh, edgy, different ways that we don't normally experience. We watch film, we watch TV, we play games in the more traditional sense, but this was a really exciting form of story telling." Same gave her a two word pitch, Investigative Thriller, and she was hooked. They began by sharing playlists and film references that inspired them. Nainita is a fan of noir and 70s spy thrillers, so naturally her influences included movies like The Conversation, China Town, and All The President's Men. Sam also wanted to Sex, Lies, and Videotapes, and the Three Colors Trilogy. For Sam, the score was an integral part of the story that needed to inform not just the directing, but the casting as well. To that end, Nainita received the script first and was tasked with creating the score before anything was shot, a fairly unconventional method for scoring a film. At the same time, the score Sam wanted wasn't exactly the typical video game score, either. "It wasn't like your average video game where you have non-stop music, where the music is very much leading the way. We were thinking quality more than quantity here. When you do have music it has an impact and it sort of subtly informs and influences the atmosphere of the game." Sam knew from the very beginning that he wanted a theme for each of the four characters. Nainita wanted to make each theme as complex and multi-layered as the characters they represented. The challenge, as Nainita described it, was creating a piece of music that fully represents who a person is: "When you go to the the obituary section in the newspaper, a person's whole life is summarized in about 70-100 words. It's kind of depressing, you think 'God, that's a whole person's life written in about 100 words.' I had to summarize all the aspects of the character in one big piece of music." To Sam, these characters were more fully realized that one could even imagine. He shared with Nainita everything he knew about them, including rich backstories that aren't even part of the game. Nainita didn't have the footage to work from, it had not yet been created. Instead, she relied on Sam to paint a picture of who these people are. RELATED: The themes Nainita created do in fact represent the duplicitous nature of each character: "The surface exterior of each character would be represented in the main loop. Then there's this hidden section that's only revealed once you dig a little deeper into the story and that persons psyche and true motives. As you get deeper down the rabbit hole and find these plot moments, a hidden musical layer of that person's personality will subliminally reveal itself. Telling Lies is presented in the form of hundreds of raw, unedited clips, secretly filmed without the awareness or consent of the subjects. To reflect this, Nainita knew that she wanted the themes to be created using pure acoustic instruments; nothing electronic or synthesized. The London Contemporary Orchestra was brought in to give the music a modern neo-classical feel while remaining warm and intimate. Ultimately, the music supports the style, themes, and presentation of Telling Lies to an incredibly nuanced degree. The details work subliminally in most cases, enhancing the experience in subtle, imperceptible ways. One method Nainita used, which is rather unconventional, was to actually improvise longer versions of the themes with the orchestra. They recorded separate versions of the themes with very subtle changes to the music through improvisation. Many of those slightly altered version are in the game, so that when players hear the themes, they're never quite the same (much like the order in which players unravel the mysteries of Telling Lies is never quite the same). The Telling Lies soundtrack is available for purchase on , , and . Nainita Desai has many upcoming projects in film and video games. You can follow her on at @nainitadesai.