Tell us a bit about your organization and what your specialty is in the film and video space.

Lionshead Entertainment is an award-winning audio and music team of passionate, dedicated creative and technical minds who bring worlds and stories to life by making them rich, detailed, and emotionally powerful. Led by veteran audio director and composer Crispin Hands, we are experts at capturing audience’s hearts and minds and keeping them coming back for more. We are a full-service co-dev studio covering every aspect of development from start to finish.  This includes everything from concept and creative pillars, music, audio direction, sound design, implementation, and code support, right up to the final polish, bug fixing and post launch support. We are agile, scalable, and have decades of experience shipping AAA titles. Deeply client-focused, we integrate directly with your team and act as a force multiplier in a seamless co-dev experience.

What is your organization’s ethos and how does it set you apart from industry competitors?

Create the unforgettable, always push the craft. We’ve been delivering award-winning, unforgettable sound and music for AAA games, VR/AR, and film for over 26 years and consistently push the state of the art forward while guided by our core pillars of quality, empathy, innovation and integrity.

How can people join or learn more about what you do?

Visit our website.

Tell us about your Telly Award winning piece. What’s the story behind it?

The Official Launch Trailer for Minecraft Legends was our opportunity to introduce legions of fans to a new story and deepening of the lore that had never been told before in the Minecraft universe, and we wanted to make sure we got it right for them.

To this end, we worked closely with our amazing collaborators Robert Fernstedt and Akram Janzi at BSmart; and Samuel Aberg, the audio director at Mojang. We collaborated tightly throughout the creative and development process to rework themes we’d previously composed for the game to fit the story being told by the trailer. This was all done with the support of the incredible teams at Mojang and Blackbird Interactive with whom we developed the game itself, and our friends at Microsoft, the publisher.

What are you most proud of about this piece? What was your biggest challenge during production and how did you solve it?

The biggest challenge we faced was giving players a brand-new experience with a signature sound while still staying true to the overall Minecraft universe. We wanted to be very careful about how we threaded that needle and worked closely with Mojang and their excellent audio director, Samuel Aberg to build on existing material and create a new and distinct sonic and musical identity for the game that was rooted in the story being told while feeling integrally connected with the existing universe.

Can you share a behind the scenes story or fun fact about the making of your piece?

We recorded a live orchestra and included world famous soloists Tina Guo, Rusanda Panfili and Kristin Naigus. The music was mixed by the incredible Alan Meyerson, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest score mixers alive and has mixed some of the most iconic scores by the top film and game composers in the world, including Hans Zimmer, Ramin Djawadi and James Newton Howard. Some of the piglin voices were performed by us at Crispin’s house and various unusual props were used to create elements of the music, including a bicycle wheel, cigar box guitar and cardboard tubes from gift wrapping paper.

Tell us about the most memorable response you got from this work.

People loved it and that made us really happy. It got hundreds of thousands of views on Youtube in a matter of hours and soon turned into 2.2 million views. In the words of one fan, “Minecraft Legends will indeed be legendary!”