Composing for Sauria: Building a Prehistoric Sound World with David Armsby

Sauria is one of the most distinctive worlds I’ve had the privilege of scoring. It’s a prehistoric setting created by filmmaker David Armsby — not a documentary reconstruction of the Cretaceous, but a fully realised fictional world with its own cultures, spiritual traditions, and internal logic. The kind of world that doesn’t just ask you to write music that sounds old, but music that sounds specific.

I worked on two films in the series: Blood for Blood and Winter Weathered. They’re as different from each other as two films in the same world can be, and that contrast taught me as much as any single project I’ve worked on.

Blood for Blood: A Sound World from Scratch

Blood for Blood is the first Sauria film — visceral, elemental, built around the cultures of the Kindred of the Tusk and the BlueSong. David’s world has its own anthropology: distinct peoples with distinct histories, aesthetics, and relationships to the land. The music had to reflect that without leaning on any real-world cultural tradition in a literal way.

That’s the interesting compositional problem with a fictional world: you can’t just reach for “ancient tribal percussion” or “medieval European strings” and call it done. The world has its own cultures that don’t map cleanly onto anything real. The music has to feel like it belongs to those specific peoples, not to a genre.

This is what I think of as musical worldbuilding in its purest form — building a sonic identity for a culture that doesn’t exist, using real instruments and real techniques as raw material, then combining and shaping them until they feel like they could only belong to this world.

For Sauria I explored everything: synths layered under rare percussion, folk instruments from various traditions used in unexpected contexts, orchestral elements stripped of their usual grandeur and made to feel more raw and immediate. The process was one of constant experimentation — finding the combinations that felt ancient without being derivative, dangerous without being generic.

Winter Weathered: The Sound of Solitude

Winter Weathered was the hardest project to approach because it moved so far from the energy of Blood for Blood. Where the first film was about conflict, the second was about a man living alone in the cold regions of Sauria — spiritual, simple, deeply connected to the natural world.

The father at the centre of the film gave me the impression of a very sensitive and spiritual character. That immediately raised a question I had to sit with for a while: what does that kind of inner life sound like in music?

I started by spotting the entire film on Dorico, taking detailed notes, then switched to pencil and paper entirely for a while. I needed to step away from the tools and think purely in terms of ideas and themes, without the seduction of a particular sound or library.

Flutes as the Core Choice

After trying different aesthetic directions and instrumental ideas, I made my decision: flutes. Flutes from different traditions and cultures around the world.

It wasn’t just a colour choice. Flutes carry something specific — they communicate spirituality, introspection, a kind of breathing quality that connects to the human body in a direct way. They have a tradition across many cultures of representing the natural world, the voice of the forest, the movement of air. For a character whose whole existence was shaped by his deep connection to nature, that felt exactly right.

Silence as a Compositional Tool

The other major protagonist of the score was silence.

Unlike Blood for Blood, where the music had presence and weight, Winter Weathered asked me to keep removing things. Layer after layer came out. I found myself searching for the minimum indispensable — the least amount of music that still carried the emotional truth of each scene.

That restraint mirrors something about the father himself: a man who has reduced his life to its essentials. The music had to do the same. Every note that remained had to earn its place by doing something nothing else could do.

It’s one of the hardest disciplines in scoring. The instinct is always to fill — to support, to underline, to add texture. Working against that instinct and finding that the silence itself was carrying meaning was one of the most valuable lessons this project gave me.

The Father’s Theme

There is a theme for the father, but it’s deliberately not melodic or definitive in the way a traditional leitmotif would be. It appears again and again, but it’s more of a harmonic or textural presence than a tune. In my mind it represented nature as much as it represented him — because his connection to the natural world was so complete that the two were barely separable.

That blurring of a character’s identity with their environment is something I find deeply interesting compositionally. The theme doesn’t tell you who he is so much as it tells you where he is — in the cold, in the silence, in the landscape.

What Sauria Taught Me

These two films together — one explosive, one meditative — clarified something I try to bring to every project now: the score should serve the specific emotional logic of this world and this story, not a general idea of what the genre requires.

Blood for Blood needed sonic invention because its world was invented. Winter Weathered needed restraint because its character had chosen restraint. Those aren’t aesthetic preferences — they’re conclusions the material leads you to, if you’re listening carefully enough.

That kind of close listening is, I think, the core skill in compositional worldbuilding. Not knowing which instruments to use, but knowing how to read what a world actually needs.

You can hear the Sauria soundtracks on the Sauria: Blood for Blood album and Sauria: Winter Weathered album pages.

For more on this approach, visit the musical worldbuilding hub.

If this kind of compositional practice interests you — reading what a world needs, making instrument choices that serve a specific emotional logic — this is exactly what I work on in private mentoring sessions. It starts with a short call to see if we’re a fit.