Composer Pedro Bromfman is best known for his collaborations with directors José Padilha and Alex Winter, but his work on the score for the latest instalment in the long-running Far Cry series, Far Cry 6, will likely bring his musical talents to an even-broader audience. The first-person shooter takes place on the island of Yara, wherein the player must attempt to help topple a dictatorship, in the role of a guerilla fighter. The game’s vast landscape and multiple regions allowed Bromfman to really branch out and explore, so it was a joy to speak with the composer about his work on the game.
STARBURST: This is the sixth instalment in a series that’s been going on for so long – nearly 17 years. Even though all of the instalments are very different and unique, did you explore any of those before working on this game?
Pedro Bromfman: Not at all. I mean, I had heard about the franchise. I knew what Far Cry is, and I have a PS4 and I have an X-Box and I do play some games – especially the ones I’m working on or that I worked on – but I’m not a gamer per se. I didn’t grow up as a gamer. I had never played Far Cry and I purposefully decided I didn’t want to be influenced and I didn’t really want to hear what musically other composers had done.
This is such a different world from all the other Far Crys. I mean, it takes place in a Caribbean island. The setting is so different and the music we wanted to do was so different that I didn’t even want to go back and be influenced at all. The good thing about this is that I was brought in so early that most of the missions hadn’t even been thought out or hadn’t been developed and there was no music at all – referenced music – that was sent me. It was really a blank slate that we were able to figure out what the music needed to be. I wanted to have as, as little influence as possible, as far as other melodies, other themes that have been used in Far Cry – other sounds and things – to be able to just start from scratch as if it’s something new, even though it is part of however many years it’s been going on for.
In addition to your score, there is an entire soundtrack of other music that’s part of this world. How involved were you with that or did that work to influence you at all?
There were some references that were sent back to me. Our concept of the whole thing is my part of the music – which is probably three and a half hours of music for the game – my side is what tells the story, the narrative of Yara and the characters and the character themes and the cinematics and the main missions that were specifically scored to sound a certain way.
It’s basically the sound that brings the player into the game. The sounds that the players are listening to, but that the Yarans aren’t aware of. Then, there’s all this other music, like street music from like street bands throughout the game, music that they listen to on the radio, ome of the regime music that are like the national anthem and all the military marches that people are listening to on the streets constantly. This is the diegetic music. This is music that the Yarans are listening to. My music is like the subconscious of the whole thing, of the island.
But what happened is, when we were creating this sounds early on, like I said, we worked on the themes and there was no other music we listened to or anything else. I think I was the first one putting music to Yara, but as we evolved, there were bands being brought in. There’s a band in the game that’s called Máximas Matanzas and it’s a hip hop group. As they were making some of the music, Eduardo [Vaisman, audio director] would feed me some of that music too, because we wanted the central region to be more urban-influenced and have some hip hop elements. So I was listening to some of that music, just to get ideas and see what I could incorporate to make that whole region sound cohesive and borrow elements from other music that they’d be listening to in that region. But other than that, there’s very little back and forth between the different parts of the music.
I was really working with the main themes and the character themes and trying to develop what the sound of each character and the sound of each region. We have three main regions: Eastern, the central, and the Western region. We try to really treat each region – while having a cohesive sound for the score – but have each region really stand out on its own.
Then, you’d be able to tell musically when you’re listening to something – that you’d be able to feel which region you’re in, just from listening to the music in the background, in each mission and things like that. That’s what we tried to do. I think some of my score, you feel it more than you actually are singing along to it, although there are some iconic melodies and some beautiful pieces that stand out.
Talking to other composers who’ve worked on games, they say the hardest part when you’re playing a game is that you’re immersed in this world sometimes for literally 24 or 48 hours, depending on how many replays or missions you do, so the real challenge is creating music that people can hear over and over and over again. As you’re trying to work your way through certain areas,you might die and then come back and you’re going to be hearing this music a couple of times. What is that challenge like for for you and did it help to have done a couple of games prior to Far Cry 6?
Yes, I think so. I think that the mechanics of writing for games – some aspects of it are very different from working in film and TV. I think not only working on games, but also working on series that goes on for several episodes – so it’s like 10 hours – it’s more like a game. You’re able to have an arc, you have a lot more characters, you’re able to give more melodies to each character. That’s definitely, definitely an important plus that has helped me do it.
I think there’s a few things to unpack from what you talked about: you have the cinematics, which is the area of a video game that’s very similar to working on TV or a movie, right? I think in this game, you’ll have probably an hour and a half of cinematics or two hours of cinematics, altogether. I think I scored 50 minutes or so of cinema, so it’s almost a film within a game with all the backstories.
When you’re scoring a cinematic, they give me an edited version that’s usually locked and I know it’s always going to play that way, so when I do the music we know where the music needs to come in ,where it needs to grow, what it needs to say. When it comes out, every time a player plays the game, it’s going to play that same way, but then when you’re in the open world and when you’re dealing with missions is what is when what you talked about comes into play.
A player can play stealth mode through the whole mission and not really disturb all of the enemies and make them all come after you, so that’s only going to trigger one specific piece of music. Or ,you can go into full combat right away and have 30 people shooting at you. How do you make these things interesting? ‘Cause they can take two minutes or less skilled player can take 10 minutes.
It’s all about being able to create loops, bubble pieces, but also divided into stems or different tracks that, stacked on one another, vary the intensity and also to give variation, when a new element comes in that you haven’t heard in the first two minutes. Then that element becomes the part of the music and then another element drops out and another element comes in, trying to create interesting music that the player can play for for 12 minutes without being bored and saying, “It’s just the same thing over and over again.”
The expanded Far Cry 6: Complete Music is out this week from Ubisoft.
