Description
Umi's Dream is an instrumental soundtrack with an added synthesizer. The imagined game of the same name is imagined to be a side-scrolling platformer with a focus on exploration and narrative.

Umi is a young girl, named for the ocean. Her late mother, a marine scientist, drowned during an expedition when Umi was a baby. Though Umi has no waking memories of her late mother, the two are united every night when Umi dreams.

One night, Umi drifts to sleep and dreams as always - but this time her mother is missing.

1) Umi’s Dream is the titular track for the game, featuring both Umi’s Theme and Mother’s Theme. It would be played on the game’s start screen.
2) Mother’s Absence is for an imagined cutscene at the very beginning of the game, when Umi fades into her next dream only to find that her mother is absent. The narrative idea then leads into the gameplay. Featured in this track are variations of Umi’s Theme, Mother’s Theme, and the first instance of the Ocean Theme.
3) Blue Dream is the track for the first level. As Umi begins to search for her mother, she is plunged into a vast and strange sea where she can breathe underwater. A variation of the Ocean Theme is the most prominent melody in Blue Dream, broken by another variant of Umi’s Theme.
4) Bubble Reef is a relatively energetic track for another level, in which Umi comes to a lively reef teeming with coral and schools of hand-drawn fish. In this imagined level, Umi has a lead on her mother’s whereabouts. Variations of all three themes - Ocean, Umi’s, and Mother’s - are present in Bubble Reef.
5) Umi and Her Mother is the track for the final cutscene of the game, in which Umi and her mother are reunited. Variations of Umi’s Theme and Mother’s Theme are present.

To create this OST, I first created the narrative idea of the game: the subject matter, the characters, the conflict, the genre of the game, etc. Once I had the game idea, I began by composing three themes: one for Umi, one for her Mother, and a third for the Ocean - where a bulk of the game would take place within Umi's dream setting.

With the themes written, I decided on the instrumentation and began sketching each track. Once each was sketched, I orchestrated the sketches into a full score. The notation entry was completed entirely in Finale. I then exported the MIDI tracks and imported them into Reaper, where I edited, rendered, and mixed the stems. Once the master track was rendered, I used Audacity for a final compression and spliced the tracks into their individual lengths and exported each as the final product.

The total runtime for Umi's Dream is 10:38.

Inspirations referenced include: Claude Debussy (Reverie, Cathedrale Engloutie), Spiritfarer, Abzu, Pikmin 4, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Finding Nemo.

Theme

Inside my world

Picture theme

How does it fit the theme?
Umi's Dream is related to "inside my world" in two major ways. First, the imagined game takes place entirely within one of Umi's dreams - in her head, her psyche, her own subconscious. Second, the narrative is about something greatly personal to Umi, which is her mother's death and how Umi mourns a mother she never knew in life.

Regarding the picture theme, Umi's Dream capitalizes on the nautical elements (the fish and the bubbles), the surrealism, the girl in pink and the joy on her face, and the bubble silhouette of the woman next to the girl.

In Umi's Dream, Umi is the girl in pink. Umi's Theme is composed to be spritely and childlike yet versatile to capture Umi's emotional journey. The bubble silhouette is thought to be Umi's mother, whose theme is composed to be tender and nurturing. Finally, the dream itself is represented by the Ocean Theme, which breaks away from the style of the other two themes in being more pad-like to represent the vastness of the ocean and the dream taking place.

The whole of the soundtrack leans into a "nautical" or seafaring sound (penny whistle, piano textures, string textures) combined with moments of ambient dream-like sounds and textures (melodies and pads on synth).

Link(s) of the submission on streaming services
https://jacobmotl.bandcamp.com/album/umis-dream

Number of tracks
5

Genre

Soundtrack use permission