This week we spoke to Luke Brown, Composer & Sound Designer at The Soundery, a music and sound design studio that specialises in cooking up "tasty noises for visual media."
How was your company born and where are you based?
The Soundery is a duo, myself and Liam Iliffe. We became friends while studying Creative Music Technology at university. Pushing each others creative practice and bumping up each others grades by being incredibly competitive with each other.
Following similar paths post-graduation, we headed to London, working in large post production and composition studios. During this time Yambo Studio got in touch to ask permission to use a song I had released on SoundCloud during my studies.
We started chatting, I showed him some reworks I had done and we began working on some projects together. This flourished into an amazing work relationship and we are continuing our collaborations still to this day.
Now, collaborating rather than competing, Liam and I work online from Barcelona and Glasgow on a whole range of projects for clients all over the world doing music composition, sound design, audio editing and mixing. We feel incredibly lucky to have had such a great start in this industry.
What was the biggest challenge to the growth of your company?
As for most people starting out in this industry, finding enough work is tough. This is a very competitive industry and there is a lot of freelance composers and sound designers trying to work with animators and studios. It can be hard to stand out from the crowd and to establish relationships with new potential clients.
Which was the first huge success that you can remember?
Our first big success was a project called ‘How to Make Sushi’ directed and animated by Jonathan Lindgren. On release it had a really great response and was quickly selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick.
We were invited to do a talk on our sound design for the project and it also led to our first award for ‘Best Sound Design’ at the British Animation Film Festival in 2020. We’re so grateful to Jonathan for trusting us with his passion project. His style is really unique and we hadn’t seen anything like it, it inspired us to create sounds in a new way and make something we could be really proud of.
What’s the biggest opportunity for you and your company in the next year?
Who knows! Projects often show up with very little notice and you never quite know what’s around the corner. One week you’re searching for leads and the next you’re buried in new and exciting projects. It’s a lifestyle that forces you to live in the moment, and to recognise the good opportunities when they present themselves.
Can you explain your team’s creative process? What makes it unique?
As with any artist, the thing that makes our work unique is our tastes and inspirations. We always start with music research, exploring every avenue we can think of. We are often surprised about what this stage of our process reveals.
When we start crafting we like to keep things loose allowing us time to develop completely custom synth patches and audio manipulation processes to help us discover a pallet of sounds that compliment the visuals nicely.
As we work mainly with animation and CGI companies, our focus from here is to start using these sounds that we have collected to emphasise and create movement and to form a structure that supports the narrative of the film. In all of our projects we aim to blur the line between music and sound design and to connect this to the visuals as much as possible.
How does your team remain inspired and motivated?
For us, it’s important to continue creating music outside of commercial projects. There is often very quick turnaround in advertising, so it’s crucial to experiment and find new techniques out of hours.
That way we have a backlog of new ideas to draw from when necessary. We spend a lot of time considering genre and style within our commercial work so this is also an opportunity for us to forget about that and let loose! Creating, listening to, loving and discussing music is so important to staying inspired within our work.
How has COVID-19 affected your company?
Aside from the obvious ways that Covid has effected all creative industries. One change that stands out to us is the normalisation of working from home, which we’ve been doing since the beginning. Now when we have video calls with clients it’s quite normal for everyone on the call to be working from home.
I think this has forced companies to realise that you don’t have to be working from a big studio to be creating really high quality work, giving more credit to some of the amazing independent studios and freelancers that work from home.
Which agencies do you gain inspiration from? Do you have any heroes in the industry?
Literally everyone out there animating, directing, storytelling and sound making in this industry. Everyone really cares about the quality of their work and pushing the envelope in their specific field.
We have always found inspiration listening to Antfood’s creations, we love their focus on using new technologies like generative music, or even physically creating instruments for a project. Not only do they focus on making the process fun and experimental, but they always yield beautiful results.
What is one tip that you would give to other agencies looking to grow?
Pursue your practice for yourself outside of your work. Be flexible and easy to work with, just because it’s business it doesn’t mean you have to stop being human and understanding towards your clients and collaborators.
How do you go about finding new clients/business? (Pitching, work with retainers, etc.)
For us, nothing has been as affective as simply doing a good job when opportunities come in. If someone is impressed with your work, trusts and enjoys working with you, they will likely work with you again and gladly recommend you to others. The majority of our work has come from strong relationships we’ve made with animators, agencies and directors.
What’s your one big hope for the future of the industry?
That talented, nice people with good ideas get to the places where they can flourish as artists, and push their practice with the mutual benefit of helping clients and companies communicate. I’d love freelance sound designers, composers and smaller studios to band together and create a stronger sense of community to support each other to develop.
Do you have any websites, books or resources that you would recommend?
I love YouTube for watching producers live stream their music creation process, music theory nerds discussing compositional techniques and sound designers breaking down game and movie sound effects. I find videos so easy to digest compared to books and love watching a few at the start of my day.
We also both use Spotify daily for listening to music and making music research playlists. We also put together a playlist of all our recent jams updated at irregular intervals (depending on how busy we are), which gives us a chance to chat about music together.
