Year
2025
Client
Silt-a Agency
Category
ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PRODUCTION
Product Duration
1 Week
MEIZE got commissioned for the scoring of an animated film. The request was challenging. Creating a scoring with a real orchestra but on a very tight budget. Eager to produce the best and deliver quality, we came up with a vision: an original orchestral piece, recorded live, with real musicians, in one of Paris’s most legendary recording studios, Studio Ferber. No shortcuts. No sound libraries. No compromises. Just the raw, living warmth of a human performance, captured in all its truth. A small crew to manage budget expectations that will then be multiplied through the VST technology.
Taking on this project was pushing our boundaries one step higher. Could we build a bridge between two worlds that do not speak the same language?
On one side, the infinite precision of the digital world—VSTs, DAWs, the ability to control everything, to correct everything, to sculpt everything endlessly. On the other side: eighteen human beings, each with their own sensibility and their own way of inhabiting a musical phrase.
We began with forty virtual instruments and hundreds of micro-decisions. We sculpted the mockup, layer by layer, not to achieve a cold, sterile perfection, but guided by an absolute rule that governed every choice: a human being is going to play this.
That constraint changed everything. We composed accordingly and anticipated the difficulties.
Then came the transcription. One hundred pages of sheet music, handwritten, without artificial intelligence. And the actual session. Half a day at Studio Ferber. Eighteen musicians. One shot.
The mockup was solid, the scores were clear, and the musicians knew exactly what the music required from them. Through our lead, the session became more than a purely technical exercise, it became a performance. That warmth, which no VST can reproduce, flooded the microphones. The music was breathing.
Most studios inhabit a single world. They are either digital natives or schooled in the classical tradition. They speak either the language of the DAW or that of the concert hall. We realized that Meize was speaking both.
The ability to compose, orchestrate, transcribe, and produce a live orchestral session, from start to finish, without ever losing the artistic thread, is a rare craft. It demands technical mastery, musical depth, and a form of human coordination that no plugin could ever replace.
