I imagined that I was given a basic animatic for the intro FMV, so that I would understand the plot and make music that would serve the story beats of the video. Given Cyberpunk 2077 as my main reference, the imagined video features the main character, an anti-authoritarian, punk slacker, as they find an abandoned terminal that they can use to access the rough, retro-futurist version of the internet, which they are eventually totally lost in.
Progressing from the dingy, rough human world, where you can hear an out of tune, imperfectly-timed upright piano and the ordinary sounds of computer hardware, the piece hits a transition point where the slacker character is slowly digitized as they log on, and moves to the climax where the character is subsumed by the online world, at which point all sounds become distorted and unfriendly, and rise into quiet.
With the musical sound design, I wanted to lean into the rough, industrial, and discarded aesthetic that the Cyberpunk 2077 composers spoke about. Thus, many of the building blocks for the percussion are found recordings of decades old computer equipment, including CD-ROM drives (ref), floppy disk drives (ref), hard drives (ref), and modems (ref), in various states of (dis)repair. The main rhythm for the piece was based on the rhythm of one of the recordings that I found, of a 3 ½ inch floppy trying and failing to read a disk, which I shaped a bit to be more musical.

Cyberpunk-style Intro Video

Composer, Sound Designer. These days focusing on games and dynamic audio (including implementation).

Cyberpunk-style Intro Video

cloudy day music