M4G: What is your musical background? How did you get started in composing music to picture?
Trevor Morris: I’ve been involved in music since I was old enough to crawl onto the piano bench and bang on the keyboard. I studied voice, violin and piano as a child, but ultimately composition was my calling. My career started in jingles, composing for television and radio commercials is how I really learned my craft.

M4G: You’re currently based at Hans Zimmer’s music production house. When did you first connect with the Hollywood composer / music producer and how has this influenced your scoring career?
Trevor Morris: I moved from my native Canada to Los Angeles in 2001 to pursue writing music at the highest level I could. Very early on, my unique set of engineering, production skills and composition lead to me work with two of my musical heroes, James Newton Howard and ultimately Hans. Hans has since become a close friend, surrogate father, and certainly my musical good taste ambassador LOL. Hans’ influence is hard to put into words, but it spans many areas of my life, some of them beyond music. He is simply put, the most intelligent human being I have ever met. He is a tough customer, and has been equally hard on me as he has been supportive of my composition career.

M4G: How did you get involved with NFS: Carbon? Were you familiar with the Need For Speed series prior to working on Carbon?
Trevor Morris: I got introduced to Electronic Arts through my agent and friend Maria Machado, who has a great working relationship with that company. I am a huge car guy, and fan of NFS. I’ve played all the car racing games at some point, from my youthful days back on my Amiga. The EA gang seriously rock at cars, they totally get real car dynamics and the feel of understeer and oversteer. I’ve raced my cars recreationally on the serious tracks in Canada and in California, so I know. Trust me, NFS Carbon is going to kick serious ass. There are also things in this game that I have seriously never seen before. I think they may be setting some visual trends that will certainly appear in feature films down the road.

M4G: How would you describe your music for NFS: Carbon and how many minutes of music did you write for the game? (Is there music in-game or have you written music for the cinematics only?)
Trevor Morris: Well, the first thing the EA team and I talked about is not wanting to do just another video game score. So there is a lot of lateral thinking happening. There are huge sections of the game that are just Japanese Taiko and Shakuhatchi Flutes. We kind of visualized a remixed pumped up version of “The Last Samurai.” We did around 40 minutes of totally interactive in- game music, recorded in layers known as “stems” as well as in emotional chapters. John Morgan at EA in Vancouver kind of surgically dices my music into these modular cubes, they are in turn triggered interactively by the gaming events. I also got to score in a more traditional manner to picture, 13 little cinematic FMV movies. That was fun for me, and it’s what I do best, “Tell story” musically as we track the progression of the characters. I love helping turn characters from benevolent to evil though music, it’s so much fun.

M4G: Do you think it’s necessary to play video games in order to understand how to write music for this media or do you treat it the same as film/TV? Do you see any differences at all?
 

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