Dialog between Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) and Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt), Chef:

CC: What exactly are you doing here?

RM: I’m eating the food. I’m eating your food.

CC: I thought my food was needy and cloying.

RM: Well, I didn’t think you’d want to serve me, so I sent somebody else to pick it up.

CC: What happened between us, that really knocked me for a loop. I mean, you robbed me of my pride and my career and my dignity. And I know people like you don’t usually care about that kind of thing…

RM: That’s not necessarily true.

CC: But you should know it hurts people like me. ‘Cause we’re really trying.

RM: You started a flame war with me. Are you kidding me? I buy ink by the barrel, buddy. What are you doing picking a fight with me? I wouldn’t challenge you to a cook off.

CC: I thought I was sending you a private message.

RM: I didn’t know that. I thought we were having fun. It was theater. By the way, what the fuck were you cooking? You totally shat the bed, buddy. How could I back that? You were one of my early boys.

CC: I had no control over the menu.

RM: Whatever the case, okay? You seem to be cooking for yourself again. Because this shit is sensational. I mean, really, really good.

CC: Thank you.

I really enjoyed this movie. Very simple and to the point. Good food is great, my opinion on critics (including myself) is iffy at best, and Twitter can be terrible. In a world of limited text, context counts. Inspiring, real stuff. Well done, Favreau.

Kickstarter:

We want to make an in-depth documentary on the personal and cultural impact of video game music. Have you ever paused a game just to hear the music play? There are thousands of artists inspired by those same sounds. Cover bands are performing phenomenal versions of nostalgic music and chiptune artists are challenging themselves with the original game music methods. Tribute albums are causing collaboration and communication between fans and their favorite composers. Remix communities are resulting in new composers to score the next generation of games. Festivals are developing into friends and families all because of video game music. We want to capture this phenomenon from many different angles to showcase the amazing communities, people, and effects this music has fostered.

Speaking of spending money on OSTs, this interesting Kickstarter has entered its final week of funding. Sign me up.

Kyle Hilliard, GameInformer:

Grant Kirkhope, composer for Rare who created the Banjo-Kazooie soundtrack along with many others, has posted the soundtrack in its entirety online for download.

When we say the entire soundtrack, we mean everything. Among the 164 tracks, you will find familiar tunes, but you will also find the small musical cues and fanfares related to things like opening doors and collecting certain objects.

I’ve been streaming the Super Mario 64 OST from YouTube at work a lot lately. (Yes, YouTube.) I understand Nintendo has a sales strategy in place for their OSTs (see Super Smash Bros. 3DS Sleep Mode OST), but come on. Want the Super Smash Bros. OST? Here’s the deal (emphasis mine):

Buy and register both the Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U games to receive a special soundtrack from Club Nintendo!

I’m not sure how Kirkhope is able to release this content, but he’s got my money. (And I’ve got a great Nintendo 64 era OST in ALAC.) Download here.

Someone call Koji Kondo and tell him we are ready for his box set.

Philip Kollar, Polygon:

Though Blizzard had split into multiple teams working on different games, part of Metzen’s approach to keep the culture together was to ensure that those teams still worked together in some ways. To accomplish this, the developer came up with the idea of “strike teams.”

“A bunch of people who are specifically not on the team for a game, who don’t have any sort of connection to the game, come in and look at your game,” says StarCraft 2 director Dustin Browder. “They go, ‘Wow, that’s dumb! I hate it!’ They’re not nice. We don’t want them to be nice. At some point, these games are going to go into the wild, and you’re going to ask people for real money for them. Strike teams are supposed to come in and go, ‘This is really good! This is really bad! I’m not going to tell you how to fix it, but you’ve got to do something.’ And then they walk off.”

In addition to strike teams, games frequently appear before Blizzard’s “design council,” a gathering of all of the game directors and lead designers throughout the company. Between strike teams and appearances before the design council, one thing regarding Titan became clear: It wasn’t shaping up.

If Blizzard’s cancellation of Titan reminded me of how Pixar handles things, “strike teams” and the “design council” certainly sound like a Pixar Braintrust.

Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace, Creativity, Inc.:

The Braintrust, which meets every few months or so to assess each movie we’re making, is our primary delivery system for straight talk. Its premise is simple: Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid with one another. People who would feel obligated to be honest somehow feel freer when asked for their candor; they have a choice about whether to give it, and thus, when they do give it, it tends to be genuine. The Braintrust is one of the most important traditions at Pixar. It’s not foolproof—sometimes its interactions only serve to highlight the difficulties of achieving candor—but when we get it right, the results are phenomenal. The Braintrust sets the tone for everything we do.

In many ways, it is no different than any other group of creative people—within it, you will find humility and ego, openness and generosity. It varies in size and purpose, depending on what it has been called upon to examine. But always, its most essential element is candor. This isn’t just some pie-in-the-sky idea—without the critical ingredient that is candor, there can be no trust. And without trust, creative collaboration is not possible.

I’m sure most successful companies have strike teams/design councils/Braintrusts of their own. It’s just not every day you get to hear about it from the best of the best.

RAC on Song Exploder:

I actually used this application called Melodyne. It’s sort of like Auto-Tune but it’s all done manually, so it’s not really automatic in that sense. You can really mess with a vocal and kind of turn it into this mechanical thing. Really play with the formant. There’s all this stuff that you can do and I use that pretty extensively in this song.

There’s this trick with Melodyne; it’s basically when you remove all the variations, it creates this kind of robotic sound. That’s what I did a lot with Kele’s vocal, not in the verses but during these sections, which I actually got from the video game Portal.

I am a big fan of RAC. Strangers quickly became my go-to jogging album when I lived in San Francisco. As RAC puts it, “a pop album with substance.” RAC’s inspiration from Giacchino’s work on LOST and perspective on remixing versus original work are interesting. Great episode of an incredible podcast.

For those who come here for games industry commentary unfamiliar with his work, check out RAC’s Nintendo Vs Sega and Nintendo Vs Sega 2.