Taking The Rat To Broadway - A Tiny Musical Project That Brought Hollywood Calling.

In 2015 at nine months pregnant and my due date having sailed past, the last thing I expected to be doing was waiting for a Skype call from one of Hollywood's biggest studio executives. I live in a rural Welsh town, seemingly a World away from water bottle meetings and fat cat lunches. However; an idea that occurred during an extended soak in the bath had surpassed any expectations my partner (also a composer/lyricist) and I had been holding. We had spent several months prior rewriting scenes from Disney Pixar's Ratatouille, eradicating dialogue and replacing it with singing. We were so fortunate that many extremely generous and extremely talented friends performed the roles (many professional West End actors) and many equally talented musicians agreed to play. This led to a fully orchestrated version of our original concept.

With an utterly deferential respect to the master of music that is Michael Giacchino, this project was simply an exercise in interpreting content and moving it into a different creative sphere, such as Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez's transformation of Finding Nemo for Disney World's Animal Kingdom.

We spent hours combing through the movie to choose scenes that could broken down and restructured as an altered storyboard which would work seamlessly with new music in a way that made sense and progressed naturally to the viewer. Eventually it was settled that we would rescore the opening scene, Ratatouille's encounter with Chef Gusteau and his emergence onto the rooftops of Paris, the cooking montage in Linguini's apartment and the final banding together of the rats to prepare a meal.

When we launched it into the World, there was a warm reception which we were grateful for. As with any project, the second it was beyond our grasp for changes we noticed our own flaws with ideas for rewrites, improvements and lyric changes leaping out like frogs, luckily nobody else seemed to notice.

The project made a big difference to our careers and means a lot to us. Many studios got in contact to say how much they enjoyed it and asked us to stay in touch about any future projects we undertake. As you can imagine, having a newborn (now four year old) changed our lives in a lot of ways. We haven't got that elusive movie deal just yet but we're really happy we created something that seemed to put a smile of people's faces.