Category: Article
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9 of The Best Anti-Festive Ads
Christmas Ads. We’re all familiar with the formula. A jovial man in a red suit, twinkling lights, a dusting of Disney snow and a suitably emotive storyline involving a toy penguin, football on The Western Front or a trampolining dog. As for the music? There are well-worn traditions there too – cue a fragile acoustic…
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From Rhapsody to Ring of Fire
Country music’s most iconic outlaw, Johnny Cash left us 15 years ago today and, with the new foot-stomping celebration of Queen just around the corner, here are seven blinding biopics to fanfare some similarly mighty musical greats. Walk The Line “If you was hit by a truck and you was lying out there in that…
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Composition – the Black Sheep of Sync?
Why is it, so many new clients we meet for the first time have such reservations about commissioning composed music? Or a preconception that the art of crafting a piece for a specific project, is somehow a second rate option (or worse still not a viable option at all)? How, when year on year budgets…
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11 Film Scores That Changed The Game
When writing music for picture it can be all too easy to fall back on tried and trusted ideas: open with a low drone, big drums for tension, reverb piano at sunrise… But here at The Futz Butler we always try to find the unexpected in terms of sounds and arrangement. Get it right and…
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How to Write a Killer Music Brief
As composers and producers writing to picture, the single most important skill we’ve developed over the years is the ability to interpret and then deliver what clients really want. As with any creative process, establishing a solid dialogue between the relevant players involved is absolutely essential. But a common challenge for many clients is they…
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Got it Covered…
Over the last decade as revenues from album sales continue to dwindle, artists and publishers are increasingly looking to exploit a rich back catalogue through syncs in advertising and digital content. Taking a well-loved (or even relatively unknown) tune and breathing a new lease of life into the song, re-contextualising the lyric or feel for…
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The Art of the TV Title Sequence
Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman famously wrote: “Work on a flop and you won’t get another job in the movies. Work on two and you won’t get a job in television.” But thanks in part to the rise of on-demand services, tribal binge-watching habits and more widely ailing cinema attendances, TV is no longer the film…
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The 20 Best Drum Sounds of All Time
For us, getting the drums on our work right is absolutely central to striking the right vibe for our clients, probably more so than an other instrument. More than ever now, bands and artists are defining themselves by their drum sound, and simply changing the way the same physical pattern ‘sounds’ can have a huge…
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Creating Creature SFX
We’ve been working on a feature project lately that presented several unique challenges to us from a Sound-Design perspective. One such challenge was to create violent and threatening creature sound effects for a full scale fight scene. Now, whilst it would’ve been very easy to reach for the nearest sound effects library, that’s not really…
