Dead Island

In 2011, Axis Animation came to me with an unusual brief. The trailer was for a zombie first-person shooter. But what they'd created wasn't a conventional game trailer. It was a slow-motion, reverse-chronology ballet of a family being torn apart. Gruesome, yes. But rendered with a strange, aching poetry.

They didn't want metal. They didn't want horror stings. They wanted something that would sit against that: something beautiful and mournful that would make the violence land harder precisely because the music refused to flinch.

The Approach

I started at the piano. Against a rough animatic of the reverse-motion sequence, I improvised a simple theme. Spare, melancholy, built more from space than notes. The kind of melody that feels like it's already half a memory. Strings came in later, layered carefully to deepen the emotional weight without pushing too hard.

The idea was juxtaposition as a compositional strategy. Where the image goes dark, the music stays luminous. The tension comes not from musical drama but from the gap between what you're hearing and what you're seeing.

We slowed the theme down slightly. The edit tightened around it. Something clicked.

The Result

The trailer was released on 16 February 2011. Nobody expected what happened next.

Within a week, over a million people had watched it on YouTube. Ten times Deep Silver's own projections. It swept round the world press in days. Dead Island became one of the most searched terms on Google, YouTube, and Twitter simultaneously. A game that had gone dark for four years, widely assumed cancelled, had become one of the most talked-about titles of the year. Through three minutes of music and image, before a single second of gameplay had been shown.

The score won a Cannes Lions Gold in 2011. The trailer is still cited as one of the best game trailers ever made. The music continues to circulate on Spotify more than a decade later.

It's a rare example of tone doing real strategic work. Not illustrating the game, but reframing it. The result elevated Dead Island from mid-tier release to AAA-level cultural event. And it put my name on the map.

10th Anniversary

In 2021, I returned to the piece with the Scottish Session Orchestra. A full orchestral recording that finally gave the composition the space it had always been reaching for. The original combined live and virtual instruments out of necessity. The anniversary version removed the compromise. What was always in the writing could finally breathe.

Being different doesn't just get noticed. Sometimes it changes what's possible.