Commentary: Ready Player One

For this clip, I decided not to write any music before 00.19 which is where the
race actually starts. This is because there already was a piece of music at the
beginning of the track and it builds suspense to wait until the flare explodes to start
the music. Trying to honour the temp track as much as possible, I kept a similar
tempo and mostly compound time throughout as well as some similarities in
orchestration such as the rapid figurations in the trumpets and continuous quaver
movement throughout. For added energy I occasionally change the time signature
between compound and simple time, creating a sense of uneasiness and constant
motion. An example of this is the shift into 7/8 at 01.25 which lasts 4 bars only before
changing back to compound time. With this clip I took a very meticulous approach,
having hit 94 hit points throughout the 4 minutes. Being such an action-packed
scene, I believe it called for such a detailed approach. This means that there are no
long themes in this piece, only very short motivic phrases, such as the one at 00.43.
There is also an intertextual reference in this piece which can be found 02.22. This is
a very short reference to the Jurassic Park theme when the T-rex appears. In order
to not overdo it, I only used the two initial perfect fifths which are enough to
recognise the theme.
In order to heighten certain moments in the action, I used brass sforzando
chords, such as the slow-motion jump at 03.00, the train crash at 00.57 or high string
tremolos such as the sequence 02.51, before the editing cuts back to Artemis and
the music follows by picking up pace again. The only other recognisable theme in
this piece is the King Kong motif which is used when he comes on for the first time
as well as when he suddenly comes back on after being gone for a while. In this
second occasion, I decided to emphasise the suddenness of his appearance by
having his theme start on the 8th quaver of a 12/8 bar, completely of the beat. This
serves as a quasi-jump scare for the audience. I chose to leave the final moments of
the scene unscored in order to heighten the effect of the slow-motion sequence
where he grabs Artemis. Instead, there is only a concluding Ab minor chord at the
end which is purposely unrelated to the last section of the music which had been in A
minor. I decided to end with this chord all with the instruments playing in a lower
register as it has an overall darker sound than A minor which fit the action better.