Arcanecomposers Alex Seaver and Alexander Temple revealed the biggest surprises, challenges, and lessons they encountered while working on the score for the hit animated series. Based on thecharacters fromLeague of Legends,Arcaneis a perfectly constructed piece from top to bottom. The score for the series is one of the many ingredients that came together to miraculous effect throughout the show, building toan emotional climax withArcaneseason 2(even as Seaver and Temple continue to work with Riot on expansions inLeague of Legends),
The music pulled from all sorts of influences and served as an ideal place to bring together the orchestral background of Temple and the more electronic music vibes of Seaver’s music. During an interview withScreenRant, Alex Seaver and Alexander Temple reflected on theirtime working onArcane, which characters proved the most challenging to get just right, and how they approach infusing characters with history through their music cues and themes.
The Biggest Lessons From Arcane Season 1’s Score And How They Impacted Season 2
“That Is Almost Never Done”
Arcanewas a massive critical success for Netflix and Riot, with the music in particular drawing accolades from around the world — meaning the pressure was on for season 2. The soundtrack has subsequently generated some huge hits, such as “Ma Meillure ennemie.” While the interplay between the soundtrack and the score was something Alex Seaver was focused on, Alexander Temple noted that “I was focusing on the scoring. I think tactically, if we knew there was going to be a song coming up or that we were coming off the heels of a song,we would approach it differently.”
“There might be a big fight, and normally you might want to score that like a fight. But when you know that there’s going to be this huge song coming up afterwards, you leave a little space so that it can hit harder. I don’t know if I would say it’s a case of the songs influencing the score, but some of the thought process went into how the songs should be built.It was along the same lines as how the score should be built.”
Seaver noted that the true trick to approaching both the score and the songs inArcanewas to discover “the cue” behind every musical moment. Because the scope ofArcanewas so large, that meant doing things a little differently than most scores and soundtracks in film and television. “A unique thing that took us a little bit to figure out during season 1 was the process of legitimately film scoring a pop song for animation. That is almost never done.”
“It’s something to do with animation, because things are getting locked so much earlier, because it takes so long to animate. In some case, I even think Disney-style musicals might have a lot of their songs written in advance, and the animation happens to it. In this case,we’re doing the same thing a film composer does, which is just writing songs to what we’re seeing on screen.” This plays into the emotional effectiveness of the scoring,
How The Successes And Lessons Of Arcane Season 1 Impacted The Score Of Season 2
“That Unlocked All Sorts Of Possibilities In Season 2”
Arcane’s score goes to a lot of places, reflecting the tonal versatility of the animated series. Episodes can range from romantic and inspiring to horrifying and heartbreaking. Adapting to that flexibility was tricky in season 1, Seaver admitted. “We had a massive learning curve with this thing. Season 1 begins with, ‘Okay, can we even pull off songs in this way?’ I don’t know exactly when we hit our stride, probably midway to a little beyond that. In season 1, it started to feel like we’ve got the process down, it seems to be working.”
That meant that when the time came for the second season, Seaver noted how he and Temple “had so much more information, experience, and confidence. We were like, ‘What haven’t we tried yet?How can we push this kind of marriage of mediums further?” Reflecting on his orchestral background, Temple noted that “at the beginning of season 1, I was more like, ‘find me a synth preset. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I’d just brute force it into the sound that I wanted.”
“There were some cues from the beginning of season 1 where I sort of cringed a little bit. It doesn’t quite hold up as well. It felt like going into season 2, we had a fuller toolbox. It was fun to revisit the characters and thematic material we’d established in season 1. To see what new directions we could take it in, as the story demanded. There were some characters that we saw brief appearances of in season 1, butdidn’t quite get the musical identity for them like we did in season 2.”
Temple specifically cited Singed, who was established with a music box tone in one of his first episodes. As Temple explained, that meant"we were hard committed to that, because it’s got to play the exact same thing every time he opens that watch. He’s going to do it six or seven times over the course of the first five episodes. That was fun.I think that allowed us a little more flexibility, even just with the musician’s recording plans."
“In season 1, we had our budget. It was all going to recording, strings, and editing. There weren’t a whole lot of ad hoc recordings. In season 2, we didn’t know exactly when all the musicians were going to record, but we wanted to have a big enough pool set aside so that we could make on-the-fly decisions.If we wanted to have a big brass section in an episode, we could. That unlocked all sorts of possibilities in season 2.”
The Arcane Characters That Challenged The Composers
“It’s All About This Dark Turn That She’s Talking”
Building a comprehensive score forArcaneis a tricky beast. Beyond the video game influences and musically-minded approach to the animation taken by Fortiche, there’s a truly massive scope of styles, tones, and approaches to the characters and lands of Runeterra. While both Seaver and Temple had plenty of inspiration to work with, some characters were trickier to land for both of them. For Seaver,the challenging character proved to be Caityln, someone he didn’t spend much time with previously. “I remember when we’re in the “Heavy is the Crown” opening thing, I was just making this badass, cool music.”
“One of the things we love about writing for [Arcane showrunner Christian Linke] is that he’s incredibly clear about what he wants and what these characters should feel like. He was already writing the rest of the season, so he knew where she was going. It took me a couple of tries, because he was like, ‘this needs to be upsettingly cruel and intense.’ What she’s going through with the task force, you’re not supposed to think ‘oh, they’re cool, oh, they’re badass.‘It’s all about this dark turn that she’s taking.”
“That was the right thing to do, in this climactic moment for the characters.”
For Temple, the real challenge came with Viktor, because “I felt like his [theme melodically] was one of the strongest ones from season 1. That being said, it was really tailored more towards the optimistic human Viktor of season 1. His story pretty quickly goes sideways, basically from the first time you see him in season 2. Because it’s one of the stronger themes, we kept wanting to bring it back. Then, at the end of episode 2, after he healed Huck, we tried to play the Viktor theme as we had established it in season 1.
Christian was like, ‘yeah, it’s too pretty. It doesn’t fit the scene.’ Because the character has an established theme, if the theme is no longer telling the story of where this characters currently is, then we need to do something different.We came up with some new material for Viktor that comes and goes throughout the season, because his story evolves pretty dramatically.”
“Sometimes there will be a faint echo of the themes we established in season 1. Then, in the final episode of season 2, when Vicktor and Jayce have their big reconciliation moment, that was a spot where Viktor’s theme was…that was the right thing to do, in this climactic moment for the characters.”
The Biggest Musical Surprises In Arcane’s Soundtrack
What’s The Best Device For Storytelling At The Moment
The world of Runeterra andLeague of Legendsexpands far beyond the limits seen inArcane. Little snippets of other settings were teased across the course of the show, with games shifting into a new story-based season model that reflects the ending ofArcaneby visiting Noxus. Considering what other corners of Runeterra they’d be excited to visit on a musical level, Seaver admitted that it was “really cool” to explore Noxus through the game. “I almost got my own post-credits scene!It was great to dig around a little bit in Noxus.”
For Temple,a visit back to the frozen tundra of the Frejord would be what got him most excited. Recalling that one of the first things he ever did for Riot was the northern-themed “Howling Abyss” music for the game’s ARAM mode, Temple noted he hasn’t gotten the chance to work on a project back in that region in all the years since. “It’s a fun challenge, with all of those icy and severe-sounding instruments. They sound pretty raw, and it’s an unforgiving environment, but you’re always trying to find the emotional hear through that. It’s an interesting creative challenge.”
This also prompted Temple to note that one of the great creative challenges that he, Seaver, and the musical team had to unlock was the musical approach to the warring sister cities of Zaun and Piltover. “How do you coalesce them into a fusion of the two?When do you keep their identities distinct and separate? With Arcane, one of the stated goals of Seaver and I working together was that Zaun and Piltover — I have an orchestral background and Seaver has this great electronic music production background. He might do more Zaun, and I might do more Piltover.”
“As the story goes on, the separation between Piltover and Zaun becomes muddied, and the characters are fighting in other environments. So much of the story was this fusion and hybrid of the two. Honestly, even looking at the Champion themes that we’ve done for League of Legends in the past, that fusion is there…You draw in other regions into these characters. This character might have been raised in Demacia, but they were taught by someone from Ionia, and they had a big part of their journey in Noxus. Rarely is the theme just ‘this is the character from Demancia.'”
That experience paid off forArcane’s score, especially in season 2 when the cities begin to work together more openly. Even the lines of reality were blurred in the seventh episode ofArcane’s season, which deposited Ekko and Heimerdinger in an alternate reality. Temple admitted that the episode had been a big surprise, “because that was so cool. I remember when I read the script, and especially after I saw the first animactic, I was like, okay.This is going to be really different.”
“It’s an alternate reality,we shouldn’t be drawing too much upon the material that’s already been established. On the other, you don’t want to start from scratch and have this sound like it’s from a totally different show.” To that end Temple and Seaver worked on building the ambiance of the setting out in a way that blended the two settings. They even “got to create songs that aren’t officially soundtrack songs,” Temple explained. “At the same time, it’s also the bleakest moment for Jayce. It’s the closest we came to horror scoring, where his environment is so brutal.”
At times,Temple had to stop thinking like a composer and approach the scenes as a sound designer. “Instead of figuring out what the melody was or what chords to do, I just pressed record and got a bunch of fodder to treat like audio building blocks. It was a combination of found instruments and weird synthetic layers processed through the gears.” This approach ensured that the music for these disparate parts of the show felt unique, while still fitting into the general approach to the show.
Looking back at the biggest surprise he encountered during his work onArcane, Seaver revealed that he feels “so much differently about the act of making music for a show than I did before. I think a lot of it was blurring the lines between what is a song and what is a cue. It was way foggier, and now I think it’s good. In a way, it should be foggy.It shouldn’t be so cut and dry. We just had such a unique opportunity to work in deep concert with our sound design team.
The added layer depth that you can create in your sonic storytelling when those departments are actually working together, instead of being separate stages of a factory line which often occurs in film and television.I’m obsessed with some of the results we got. It’s not just that louder is better. It’s like I’m thinking about this scene as a ballet. What’s the best device for storytelling at the moment? Sometimes I may even want my music to get shoved aside for the sound design, because that’s what is going to bring me into this thing emotionally.”
More than anything, Seaver’s time inArcanetaught him the kind of approach he can bring to all of his future projects.“When is it worth fighting for a song? When is it important that something is heard, and when it isn’t? We’re all little filmmakers, even if I only do this music thing. That was probably one of the most profound experiences for me.”
