The BFG

Our friends at Cosgrove Hall were developing a feature-length animation of Roald Dahl's The BFG and invited us to pitch for the score. Once we'd landed the job, Malcolm came up with an inspired approach to the book's famous "farting" chapter — which, at the time, was still a blank space in the script — and remarkably, our song Whizzpopping! was accepted outright. A great way to start.

​

Musically, the plan was to split the film roughly down the middle: half scored with a full orchestra, and the sequences set in Giantland built entirely from synths. For those, we were working with one of the very first Fairlight systems in the country — a genuinely enormous machine to operate, but one capable of extraordinary sounds. Because the animation wasn't finished yet, we were composing to storyboards, syncing our demos to rough footage — an experience that left us in total awe of Carl Stalling, the genius behind the scores for classic Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoons, who'd been doing exactly this decades earlier.

​

The orchestral cues were recorded at CTS Studios in Wembley, and it was, frankly, a nail-biting experience. This was long before demos could be mocked up with realistic samples, so the very first time we heard our piano sketches translated into a full orchestra was at the session itself, in real time, with everyone listening. Fortunately, it all came together exactly as we'd hoped.