Through Collaboration, Eclectic Music and Bark Soho Bring Musical Excellence to Ridley Scott’s ‘Behold’

The new Ridley Scott short 'Behold', shot entirely on the Galaxy S23 Ultra, takes the legendary director into a new world of shooting in close quarters. Written by Luke Scott, and based on an idea from the newly established Ridley Scott Creative Group, the collaborative family approach to making this film was mirrored by their partnership with Eclectic Music and Bark Soho. The sister companies worked symbiotically to produce all music and sound design from their shared Soho studios.

Scott praises the access that shooting on a phone granted to small spaces, enabling him to enter very real environments. Visually, there is a gritty intimacy to this film, beautifully enhanced by the music and sound work. The music seamlessly interweaves itself throughout the film, with strains of an epic drumming sequence, cut to on camera, echoed moments after the drumming has ended in the sound of a gang waging metallic destruction on a car. 

The sequence that follows features the main protagonist singing an arrangement of Amazing Grace. This was recorded live during filming, made possible by the actor wearing an ear piece through which Eclectic composer Colin Smith could feed through a metronome tick for timing and the key in which he needed to start singing. A detail which meant the music could really match and amplify the film's visual ambition to find authentic glimmers of beauty within a real and challenging environment.

Smith's presence on set to supervise the music throughout filming also meant that he was quite literally all ears for the live recording on the sound as well. Wearing an ear piece at all times to ensure smooth recording of the music, he was able to listen in on all sound being recorded over the various takes and provide valuable notes to Bark's Markus Ffitch back in London, who was to do the final sound design. 

Ffitch says he viewed the approach to the sound design for the film much more in terms of a responsive arrangement, given its musical back bone, working to build a real cacophony of sound at points, interspersed with more viscerally intimate moments. He also took inspiration from films like Stephen Spielberg's West Side Story to marry the gritty urban reality of the environment with the film's musicality and physical pace. 

For Eclectic and Bark, being able to maintain a constant working dialogue between musician and sound designer was key to the success of ‘Behold's’ whole soundscape. The final achievement was a real creative consensus for everything that you hear on screen.