Composer Raphaelle Thibaut Gives Voice to Animals at Heart of “Sea Lions of the Galapagos”
It’s not often that someone leaves the corporate world for that of film scoring, but that’s the story of Raphaelle Thibaut. After over a decade in communication and journalism, Thibaut left it behind for one of her earliest loves: music.
Thibaut has scored a few projects for Disneynature. Her most recent outing, Sea Lions of the Galapagos, follows little Leo the sea lion as he grows up on the island. Raphaelle Thibaut sat down with Beyond the Cinerama Dome to discuss her career pivot, using music as the voice for animals, and telling the universal story of parenthood through her score. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Beyond the Cinerama Dome: I read that, about ten years ago now, you had a massive career change. You went from the corporate world into composing. Can you talk a little bit about that leap of faith?
Courtesy of Raphaelle Thibaut
Raphaelle Thibaut: I hail from France, where I was classically trained, a very formal training to music. I did a lot of piano and I was semi-professional when I was 17. Then I was basically told that if I didn't want to be a performing artist, like a performing pianist, music was not for me.
I come from a very small town in northern France where they're not necessarily aware of all the possibilities for musicians. They didn’t know about the educational programs you can get at the Royal College of Music of London, for example. The kind of stuff where you can have a composing or film-scoring curriculum.
I was obsessed with film music already. Since as long as I can remember, I've been obsessed with film music. It would have been kind of an easy guidance to push me to film scoring, you know? But I didn't get that. I ended up just quitting music, crying a lot over it. They thought music was not for me, but I felt in my bones that it was what I wanted to do.
I studied communication and journalism and I ended up in tech at Google, where I spent six years. During this corporate life, I was invited to an event with Google at Abbey Road Studios in London, where I lived at the time. I was in this mixing room and there was an engineer who was demoing what it means to record a film score in the studio. It was for the movie Fury, with a score by Steven Price, who I've always been obsessed with.
I just had an epiphany and I was like, this is where I belong. I didn’t know anything about how these wires work together, these monitors, all these things…I had no clue. I just knew that it was where I belonged.
Two days later, I quit my job and I started as a composer. For maybe five years, it was a lot of pitching. Just sending my work all over the place, being approached by agents, working on advertising, library music, short films. I just worked my way up from there.
I was 30, I had reported to people for 13 years in the corporate world, and I was like, I'm not ready to report to someone again, you know? I'm just going to do this on my own. Other people told me to go and be an assistant to another composer, be a service composer, or just go back to school. I rejected all those ideas, which was kind of crazy to think about it.
I really started from nothing, and I take a lot of pride in building this on my own from basically zero. I mean, I had the background in classical music, which is great and helps a tremendous amount, but, yeah, it was a big leap.
How may the corporate world have unexpectedly prepared you for the world of film scoring?
The tech world, I think, taught me how to present myself in a good way. It also taught me how to speak English, because I couldn't speak English before that. Also how to send my work to people in a good way. Being loud but not intrusive, being detailed but not too detailed, setting the right words.
I think that really helped me tremendously. Working on bigger projects and stuff, it helps me. It still helps me to this day to know how to read a room. How to create this connection, this bridge, between the filmmakers and me, trying to understand what they're after, trying to not let my ego take over.
Courtesy of The Composer Works
And you got to score part of Sea Lions at Abbey Road. Is that the first time you had been back since that fateful day?
It was not the first time. I was invited and it was just the strangest, weirdest thing. I got an email, a few weeks after I quit my job at Google, from the head of engineering at Abbey Road Studios. His name is Mike and he's a really good friend now. He just said, “I heard about your work from this random girl that I met the other day and if you want to come over and have a tour of the studio, let me know.” You don't just get to tour Abbey Road Studios. You have to get invited or you’re scheduled to record.
I really had a very, very, very special relationship with Abbey Studios. When it came to recording Sea Lions, there was no other place. It wasn't the actual studio, but the ballroom, where I got this epiphany. It was really special. It was really a full-circle kind of moment for me. It was pretty amazing.
You've scored some narratives and some documentaries. Do you find there’s a difference in terms of what you’re writing for the two different types of storytelling?
When it comes to documentaries, I think it really depends on the documentary. For a documentary like Sea Lions, there’s a strong narrative. There's a storyline, there's little Leo, and you just follow him in these tough but beautiful environments.
You see him when he's a baby, a teenager, and then when he gets the power that's required to own an island. There's a strong story behind it, so it’s kind of similar to a narrative. It's also Disney, right? It's very much the narrative world.
In some other documentaries, it kind of matters less because it's going to be more about specific scenes where the stories are not necessarily connected. Sea Lions is a very different take and a very different journey. In those cases, I'm going to take one scene at a time, kind of separately, independently. For Sea Lions, it’s having this theme for Leo that grows with him throughout the film.
I'm always curious about when composers get brought on to projects because it varies immensely. With this being a nature documentary, I would imagine the production time is quite long. Were you creating pieces of the score while you were working on other projects, or did you come in when the narrative was fully shaped?
It definitely takes some years to shoot, so I was brought on in the spring of 2023. Then the conversation kind of stopped for a while, but I made it very clear to them from the get-go that I wanted to be involved, and they were very happy with that.
Usually, what I do is I work on suites. Not necessarily melody or theme, but suites that can be the ground for the rest of the score. I didn't work to any pictures when I did that. I remember that we discussed the idea of one thing versus the other. It’s a very recurrent theme in this film. You have the cold, mesmerizing underwater world, and then you have the rocky land that's literally been created out of volcanoes. We had to work through these dueling worlds with the music.
It was so great to be able to do it very early on, because I could do all the research and experimentation to get to a point that everybody was happy with. I think it was around early 2024, or summer 2024, when I started to actually score to pictures. It was a long journey, but I think it's so great to be able to take all the time you need to.
It just feels like the score is going to be stronger, have more thickness, and maybe a soul because the process has been going on for so long. Scores tend to have a bigger soul when you do that. I love to be brought in pretty early, but it's not necessarily the case all the time.
Courtesy of The Composer Works
Like you said, the visuals of the Galapagos, they're wildly different between the water and the volcanic world. In terms of a musical standpoint, do you have certain instruments that you reserved for the underwater or the volcanic land parts?
I basically used the same instruments, but I processed them differently. It's funny because, from the get-go, the filmmakers were not really into giving many clues on the location, which I totally get because you want to stay closer to nature. You don't want to give any human music clues that are going to take us closer to the human world. They really wanted to be closer to nature.
What I did was, I hope, subtly use instruments from the location from the Galapagos in a way that they were so processed it could really be many different countries, many different regions of the world. For example, the rocks, as you said, the volcanic land and the water, I would process the instruments differently. The charango would be very dry and rough when it comes to the land, and then it would be heavily processed for the underwater world with reverb.
I think what Disney does so well with these documentaries is that it feels like you're watching a story of humans and people, but in the story, like you said, you don't want it to feel like humans have had an influence on it. What does that look like in terms of your sketches, your early concepts? Do you ever have to check yourself and be like, oh, I'm starting to sound like I'm aware of humanity?
Yeah, totally. It is not an easy thing to do. It's just so easy to fall into the clues because, as humans, we really want to relate to things. We want to be able to relate to things that are familiar. It's almost like an instinct, you know? We just want to stick to the familiarity of something.
It's so easy as composers to fall into that trap and then just go back to center again to feel familiar. Like, oh, yes, I know this is an instrument from Latin America, I know where I am, I feel more safe now. It's really all about that. At the same time it's Disney. They have a certain way to shape their scores and their music. They have a signature. It's almost like fiction.
Photo courtesy of Disneynature
We have the story of Leo. It has to have some familiarity and relatable things. I really had to play between the two worlds. I think the filmmakers on that project and the producers were extremely helpful in that sense, because they always guided me and they had very great instincts. That made it so much easier. The collaboration process was a dream, to be honest.
Also, as soon as you want a melody or a theme, let's say for Leo, it is going to, at some point, lean toward Western music. I think the idea is to play your textures, instruments, and processing to kind of be both relatable and familiar.
You used instruments like an ocarina, charango, and quena. They’re manmade instruments, but how do you give the feeling that they’re coming about naturally in terms of the theme for Leo the lion?
It's funny, because for Leo, it was piano based, so I could not go more Western and human than that (laughs). I was really just trying to play around with the cuteness of the little animal.
I started with the piano, and then I took the theme to places where it was much bigger. Used more orchestral textures and instruments. For the really traditional instruments, I tended to use them for very specific scenes and situations. For example, the ocarina. It's a very funny-sounding flute, that's what it is.
Photo courtesy of Disneynature
There are scenes in the film where you've got these birds who are making these weird movements with their heads and these incredibly annoying sounds. They're hilarious. I just found that the ocarina was a great instrument for them because it's very sharp, short, and kind of silly.
Some instruments just make complete sense. It was so easy to lean toward them for certain animals. When we have this big sea lion, an adult, threatening one who is defending its island, I went with a tub. Just making it sound a little silly as well, and a little funny. I think the instrumentation was more tight to situations and scenes than animals.
For Leo, I went full-on traditional. I had to find these things with my piano. There's also this cute relationship between him and his mum. That's when we entered a more traditional world of Disney music where it just feels familiar. It's a mum and her baby. You kind of want to relate to that in this way, which is what Disney excels in.
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