WomenGamers.Com had the great pleasure of interviewing the Interactive Achievement Award-winning composer, Winifred Phillips. Her list of accomplishments are quite impressive as you can read in her biography. Her music can be enjoyed in the video games Shrek the Third, The Da Vinci Code, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and God of War.
WG: You have a number of prestigious awards to your name for your work in creating music for video games. Which project are you the most proud of and why?
Phillips: I’m very proud of the music I composed for the “Shrek the Third” video game. It was a real privilege – not to mention loads of fun – to write music for that cast of characters. Shrek, Donkey, Puss in Boots and Fiona were wonderful inspirations, and the new characters like Artie, Merlin and Sleeping Beauty were a blast! I’m also proud of my work on the game because the project was very challenging. The world of Shrek requires a sophisticated orchestral approach, with lots of recurring themes for the characters and the fairy-tale setting in which their story takes place. At the same time the music has to maintain a constant flexibility that allows it to veer wildly between epic drama and screwball comedy. I had to push the envelope, artistically and technically, to create the kind of musical score that this game demanded, and I’m very happy with the way the music turned out.
WG: At what point did you decide to go after game music composition? Did you always know that this was what you wanted do?
Phillips: Not at all! I’d always been interested in music composition, and I’d been an avid gamer since I was a kid, but I’d never made the mental connection between the two until the original Tomb Raider game was released. The game disc allowed you to play back the music when you weren’t playing the game. I was listening to one of the tracks, and that’s when the light bulb went off. At the time, I was working for National Public Radio as the composer for a series called “Radio Tales”, which adapted classic stories like “War of the Worlds” and “Homer’s Odyssey” for the radio. Each drama called for wall-to-wall music, so I was pretty busy! But I kept the idea of writing game music in the back of my mind, and after the “Radio Tales” series wrapped original production and transitioned to XM Satellite Radio (where you can hear it on channel 163) I convinced Winnie Waldron, the music producer for the series, to make the leap into the video game industry with me. We’ve been working on game music together ever since.
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