CineConcerts was very fortunate to speak with Raphaelle Thibaut about her score for the documentary series Secrets of the Whales! We discussed what inspired her, her composing process, and the emotional depth of these majestic creatures.

CineConcerts (CC): What’s your background and how did you get into music and composing?

Raphaelle Thibaut (RT):  I started playing the piano when I was very, very young. I had some hearing problems and my parents made me play the piano because apparently it was a good instrument for people with hearing issues because it's a soft instrument, you don’t have to tune it yourself. That's the reason why I started music, piano more specifically. So, I started very early on.

When I was a child and then a teenager I was already very, very much into film music and I really don't know where it came from, because it was really not a thing at home. My parents are very hard-core music lovers, classical music but not necessarily film scores. But I was obsessed with films not even being aware of the concept of soundtracks until I actually bought my first CD. So, in my mind it was more a dream than like an actual job that you could make money at.

So yeah, I continued music actually afterwards. I trained, I played the piano in the classical piano in the field for 15 years at the conservatory and at 18 years old I just dropped out. I just wanted to do something else and I ended up in tech, working in advertising at Google. And I think it was six years ago, I had a life changing event that turned my life upside down and I started as a composer—I left my job two weeks after this event and I just started as a composer. I was already kind of composing stuff but nobody had ever, even my family or my close friends, had ever heard anything that I composed because it was really something that I was not daring to put out there.

So, I really started from nothing. And then I started to get a few gigs here and there, commercials, short films, documentaries. Then things changed pretty quickly and actually Secrets of the Whales is my first large-scale project.

CC: How did you get started with the documentary?

RT: Very early on, actually, when I started as a composer two agents approached me and they said that believed in my music and they start just pitching my music for projects. Then we met Brian Armstrong who’s filmmaker for Secrets of the Whales from Red Rock Films. They remembered me a year after this encounter and they said, “We’re looking for a composer for a series for National Geographic about whales.”

I remember that at the beginning I was not supposed to write for the whole series, I was supposed to write for maybe an episode and they were kind of looking for multiple composers. I ended up doing the whole thing so I think they were happy with what I did and that was very fulfilling to be able to just own it.

CC: This score is a very interesting mix of classical and electronic. I understand that you didn’t actually record with an orchestra but you actually did it all in the studio on your own.

RT: Yeah. The only part that I played and that I recorded was maybe my voice because I used my voice for some of the hybrid elements. I played the piano of course, but that was pretty much it, all the rest is as we say “in the box” at production and mixing.

It was a challenge because I think it wouldn’t have been easy anyway even if we would have wanted that because of Covid. I really started working on the show March last year, right when it started and it was really bad the few months after that so I don’t think it would have been possible or an option, though I know that after that a lot of composers found ways to work remotely. We were really just at the beginning of it so it would have been tricky anyway.

It didn’t really bother me because there's something that I kind of like about the challenge of not being able to record. It's really a mix of challenge and opportunities because, in a way, it makes me feel so much freer in terms of using hybrid elements, like, a lot of electronic elements to it. Also, not paying attention to the amount of strings or violins or woodwinds, which is something I was really used to doing because I did a lot of trailers and trailers are incredibly layered with tons of different instruments. It’s like three stadiums of strings for one trailer so I was not used to that.

It was not such a huge obstacle but the challenge is, obviously, you really want it to feel and sound authentic so you have to sometimes find ways to work around it. And it's true that sometimes, because I knew it wouldn't be recorded, I had to change the melody or intonation just for it to allow the piece to sound authentic.

CC: For your composing process, did they already have the footage ready for you with the narration intact? Or did you not have the narration to work with?

RT:  I didn't have to Segourney [Weaver]’s voice at first, I had another person, a male voice, and they finished filming right before I started. So, I had all the footage. It was a little raw and it was not initially the final edit, but I wrote to the picture right away. It was great because I worked on some other documentaries where it’s just not ready. It's not done filming or it still needs a lot of work from an edit perspective. So, you can't really work to the picture from the beginning, but in this case, it was, and it was amazing to be able to do that.

CC: I understand if there's a story behind what sparked your imagination for the music on this particular series. When you were younger, you mentioned you had some hearing issues and that really affected this specific score.

RT: I think it did, but in probably an unconscious way because there is something that's left from my old days, you know, with all these infections with my ears. It’s that I can't really go underwater, even if I’m in a pool, putting my face under water by like five inches, it’s going to hurt. It’s actually something that I dread doing, it’s scary because of the pain and also bad memories from my childhood. So, I know that those places, I’ll never be able to go to.

Brian will tell you the opposite, because he told me that he would take me in a bubble and we would be able to work on a symphony in the deep ocean, which is like my ultimate dream. But it’s really not a place that is familiar to me for that reason, so it had this almost mystical, fascinating aspect to it.

Yes, I guess it influenced me, so I had already a fascination for the deep ocean and diving. There was this French movie from the 80’s, The Big Blue, and the score for this movie by Éric Serra features whale sounds. The thing is Éric Serra didn’t record whale sounds, he recreated them with synthesizers, it’s completely synthetic and I was fascinated by that as a composer already. It was tempting for me to be inspired by the process he used for that.

CC: These types of documentaries about the Earth and creatures within their ecosystems—with whales in particular you see how, for lack of a better term, magnificent they are. Some of them are just gigantic and it’s kind of strange because throughout this documentary you also see that despite their size and power there is fragility.

In Secrets of the Whales, you really see the wide range of emotion that whales are capable of and that’s really reflected in your score. There are moments of sadness, there are moments of high-tension, some that are cute and whimsical. Did you have any challenges balancing the emotion for certain scenes?

RT: Yes, exactly. That's such a good question because in some scenes, you know, I had to find a way to keep this emotional weight and this, like, the fact they are magnificent, but there's also something pretty funny that's going on, you know? You also want to illustrate that, so some moments have been tricky, actually the ones that are playful when the baby whales are getting trained but then five minutes after there’s a big danger and they can disappear, just being eaten by another whale or by another animal.

So, it was tricky to balance everything and what really struck me when I composed for this show is that the spectrum of emotions and situations, they are in are really similar to our spectrum of emotions. It goes from the grandma who's going to teach her grandkiddos how to hunt and then two minutes after you see a mourning mother who is carrying her dead calf for days because she can’t let go.

And it is, it does sound and look exactly like our emotional patterns and situations and it really struck me. I did know that we're incredibly complex and had very complex, emotional lives I didn't know that these lives were so similar to ours and to our societies. I think that the show really features a lot of the look they have, the eyes of the whales—you can see in their eyes that they’re just like us. And it's very complex and I think that we don’t know, we’re just starting to understand them.

CC: It’s also really interesting because there’s this association of nature being survival of the fittest, but when the diver goes in and gets really close in the first episode that the whales actually offer him some of the stingray they’re eating. It’s really amazing! And then they’re like, “Oh you’re not going to eat it, well I’ll have it then.”

RT: That was actually one of my favorite moments to score. When this Orca is feeding Brian a fish, it’s fascinating and there’s a couple of different ways you can interpret this. Is it an offering or is the animal just worried that Brian is so skinny and small that he needs to eat? I don’t know. Either way, it’s this act of generosity, it’s very special. We always think ‘eat or be eaten’ and I found it really disarming and fascinating. It was one of my favorite moments to score, to be honest, because it was “should I be more emotional? Should I be more spiritual? Should it be a little sad also?” There were so many different angles I could have taken that scene because it’s a mix of it’s funny, it’s also incredibly beautiful at the same time. You want to give it the emotion that it deserves and it was tricky.

CC: There's a main recurring theme that we hear throughout the show in different ways and it's on the album in certain tracks, but is there a name for that theme?

RT: No, there isn’t. Actually, it’s funny because there’s three recurring themes in the score, unfortunately the soundtrack only includes only a few tracks.

I was very free in the way I would come up with angles and themes and creative ideas to the production and I just decided on my own that I was not going to create one theme for per episode or one theme per species because I wrote one episode at a time. In my mind, I really wanted it to feel like one single story because they're all part of one family and we are also part of this big family and I wanted it to be consistent.

So, the way I did it is that when—I think I know which theme you’re talking about, it’s the one that always came back to my mind when it came to majestic events. It's not that recurring to have this big moment in slow motion where the music can take the whole space and there’s no narration. It’s really just the music and slow motion and this is where that theme was very important. It was not related to one specific species or situation in particular.

CC: So, I watched the series and then I went to the album and listened to it on repeat because I’m a music nerd. Though my personal favorite track is “Majestic Dances,” there was another moment in the show that I thought was just great.

It’s during the humpback whale episode, Episode 3, I think. The narrator is describing how they use bubbles to catch fish and says, “think of it like and orchestra” and then right after that in the score it sounds like a large orchestra warming up before a performance.

RT: It is! It was one of my creative choices and I was like, “I’m just going to go for it,” like when an orchestra is tuning and they loved it. It almost feels a little too literal so I thought maybe it’s not going to go, but they loved it.

Actually, I feel it is the case throughout the show that the way they’re organizing, the way they’re constantly communicating with bubbles, big sperm whales taking this position and they’re all together like a big ballet. This bubble ring thing, what is it if not a big ballet? That’s something that I had no idea the whale would do before I saw it and I was in awe the first time.

CC: Were there any cues that immediately came to mind when you saw the sequence? Or were there any that maybe conversely took a while to nail down?

RT: Usually the way I do things, when I can, I love just watching the images for the first time and having my piano at hand. It’s right there, I just have to pull it towards me and usually I just start drafting some melodies, some themes, some textures, and different instruments. I did that here as well.  I wish I had something to tell you about a rational process behind it. “I'm going to do this when this happens.” It was very, very highly intuitive.

The thing that happened is that after my work was done and people started to see the show, people started to tell me, “That’s interesting that you used the cymbals for the wave crashing.” Or, “That you’ve used some strings to illustrate the whale sounds.” I actually realized after the fact that all these instrumentations that I used to try and illustrate or replicate the sounds of nature, but with a melody. It was completely intuitive. I didn’t think it through.

It may be another prime example that we are very connected to nature in general and that we just find different languages to connect with each other, like with the animals, with other human beings, with other places on Earth. That really struck me, because people came to me after the fact.

CC: Are there any cues that we haven’t mentioned that you would like people to listen for while watching the show?

RT: Yes, I personally have one favorite. It's called “A Summer Spectacle” on the soundtrack and it's the big moment when we see the sperm whales get out of the water and do this dance, which is actually just a family reunion. Just friends reconnecting after years, which is sounds completely insane when you think about it. The slow motion of the whales slowly coming out of the water like that, it’s such a magical moment. There's an explosion of music and I think if I had to choose one moment where I’m really happy with images and the music sync, I think it would be this one.

CC: What advice do you have for composers that are just starting out that maybe want to get into composing for film and TV?

RT: I think that would be never, never stopped practicing even when you're succeeding. I think that you should never put something out there that you're not 100% happy with, especially at the beginning. There’s this gap between your taste, because obviously if you want to do this you have great taste—it means that you have a big sensitivity for the music.

Now you have to have your skills meet this taste level, and then it takes time, it takes a lot of time. And I think it only comes with practice. It’s the keys for, really, anything that related to music, but especially with modern music nowadays for TV and films where you really have to master the software and digital music. It's a long process and I'm still learning. I've been doing this 12 years now and I'm still learning so never, never stopped practicing.

CC: Do you have any upcoming projects you can tell us about?

RT: There’s one that I’m allowed to talk about, it’s a project that is already done and is going to be released later this year. It's a documentary, a film this time, not a series, about Selma Blair the actress. Who, I don't know if you heard, but she's struggling with serious Multiple Sclerosis and she's very sick. This is an incredibly raw documentary and an incredible portrait of a celebrity like we've never seen before. I don't think we’ve ever had such an intimate, raw portrait about a celebrity and I'm very, very proud to have been part of this. She’s an amazing woman and the world deserves to see who the real Selma Blair is and the title is Introducing Selma Blair.

Secrets of the Whales is now streaming on Disney+!