Meeting of minds
In making Contemporary Drama Toolkit, Samuel Sim and the team at Spitfire have carefully harnessed some astoundingly rich textures from a range of instruments. Sim’s range of award-winning scores have included the recent Netflix fantasy epic The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and BBC One’s The Victim.
He has long been aware of the deadline-pressures that this is aimed to alleviate. Working at Tileyard Studios in North London, Sim would regularly discuss the state of the industry with the neighbouring Thomson and Henson, and the three ultimately decided to collaborate. Their first project, the delightful, harp-bending Chrysalis, was released in 2016.
The team’s next foray introduced velocity-triggering. British Drama Toolkit was unveiled in 2018, and its success led the team to spend the next three years expanding on that approach with CDT. Allowing for these articulations’ curated layers to be armed and ready to go with a simple key press really does change the previously time-demanding game for modern composers, and it’s likely that Spitfire will continue this novel direction in the coming years.