A Leap of Faith - Postmortem

"FREEDOM"
by @the_misty_eden

Premises

I wanted to challenge myself for my third composition ever done (after a big hiatus since the last big OST Jam 07, and Crunchtime seemed like a good idea. I was captured instantly by how beautiful this image is. The girl in the dark stretching her arm to reach the light, the shadows of windows (but almost akin the bars of a cell), the bird, everything in the picture is incredibly evocative with the text theme. My first thought was of course the metaphysical nature of the theme. "Freedom" in the sense of that picture is thematically tied with the struggles of the mind. Escaping the darkness that binds us

A journey to escape the darkness

The picture shows a character with an emotionless expression almost, like they've been emptied from their life force.

In a sense, this makes me think of the feelings you stop experiencing when you are depressed.

Depression binds us to the darkness, our mind becomes our prison.

We stop "feeling", we stop loving, we stop caring... The fact that they only had the strength to get one of her arms up, with her hand loose shows me how much of a struggle it was to move towards the light.

For me this is really a journey to escape the darkness of our minds, with all our might, even if it is incredibly hard to move and feel the world around us.

A Leap of Faith

I wanted to have three tracks for this OST: Mind Prison, Struggle, and A Leap of Faith.

I wanted to kinda represent the journey of someone escaping their own darkness in a way. From being in their "Mind Prison", to fighting to break out, and finally taking the leap of faith towards freedom.

The Struggle will unfortunately not be represented due to lack of time, but I tried my best :)

Music

First thing was I wanted a structure of three songs, as stated earlier.

Now I wanted to start with the last track, the leap of faith, and figure out some kind of single piano melody as I already had in mind that this small motif was going to be played one way or another in the first track too.

I came up with this little line that is both emotionally charged with melancholy and hope (of course totally subjective).

Now the idea of Freedom is as if the character just got out of the darkness and was basking in blinding light. It takes a few moments to decipher what's there but the warmth engulfs them and they start seeing what's outside. The idea was to have them break out and running and ending with a jump towards the sky where the camera would then zoom out and show birds flying over them.

I wanted this overwhelming sensation of freedom, so the track goes from melancholy and peacefulness to somewhat intense. I think this intensity works as depression can sometimes be akin to a fire extinguished.

I wanted to represent this intensity as a burning fire, a willingness to try, live and adventure, fear, hurt, but always remain hopeful!

Now for the first track I wanted the opposite, an oppressive ambient atmosphere.

But little by little, you hear something, some static, like you would be tuning to a different frequency in yourself, and start hearing birds. The melody slowly comes around, like little notes of hope and light.

As we go through the track the melody gets more and more intense, and by the end the static and the birds are overwhelming your senses. And it cuts abruptly to what was supposed to be the struggle track not made on time.

Game Design Considerations

This game should most probably be an action adventure game.

You start week in a place of darkness, find light in the darkness, fight shadows representing all kind of fears, and finally end up fighting your way out to the light.