you can’t unhear a film

We’re named after a dog that hunts by sight.

So it’s a little ironic how much of our time goes into sound.

Here’s why.

the brain doesn’t do picture and sound separately

Watch a video of someone saying “ga”, dubbed with the sound “ba”, and most people hear “da”. It keeps working even once you know the trick.

It’s called the McGurk effect, first published in 1976. Your brain doesn’t choose between what it sees and what it hears. It blends them into something new.

Your audience never just watches your film. They watch it with its sound, and they can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.

music decides what the pictures mean

In a 2001 study, researcher Marilyn Boltz scored the same ambiguous film clips with positive music and with tense music. Viewers read the characters completely differently.

When they were asked about the clips later, they even remembered them differently.

Same footage. The music wrote the story.

bad audio makes smart people sound less smart

In a 2018 study, people listened to identical talks with clean audio and with poor audio. With poor audio, they rated the speakers as less intelligent and their work as less important.

Same words. Different mix. A different verdict on the person.

why corporate music quietly kills a film

Library tracks are built to fit everything, so they end up meaning nothing. Your audience has heard that same uplifting track under a competitor’s ad, a property listing and someone’s webinar.

Worse, it tells people what to feel before they’ve felt it. In unscripted work, the realness is the whole point, and a generic score undoes it in four bars.

the Succession trick

Nicholas Britell wrote one main theme for Succession, then rebuilt it again and again across the series. By the end, a few notes were enough to put you straight back in the room.

Brands can own a sound the same way.

how we do it

Every Sighthound film gets an original score, made for one brand only.

We set the sound before the first cut - tempo, key, instruments and feel - and write it into your film bible, so every future edit matches.

One hero theme, with a new arrangement for every film, every length and every platform.

And voices always come first. The music works for your people, never over them.

Sighthounds track by sight.

We track by ear as well.

[talk to us]

References: McGurk & MacDonald, Nature, 1976 · Boltz, Music Perception, 2001 · Newman & Schwarz, Science Communication, 2018