Composer’s Notes

Wizard School Dropout is an interactive, “choice-driven” show on Eko.com (see GritDaily and Variety about it).

For composers of these interactive shows, one special challenge is in timing of transitions between scenes. Viewers often choose between are 2 or 3 possible paths forward.

If the music cue ends within the branches, it’s simple enough, you can score the end of the cue three different ways, one for each branch.

What gets more interesting is when the music needs to cover from scene A to scene C, with to “B” branches in between:

A-> [ B1 or B2 ] -> C.

The transition points in and out of B1 and B2 must exactly alike - to the sample! If B1 and B2 are different lengths, this can be tricky.

In every case, it took a bit of musical sorcery (really, sleight of hand). In Episode 12 there was one particularly tricky sequence where I did to sneak in one musical hiccup!