Hello!
We are Thea and Graham and AYANE Studios is our fledgling animation and music studio. It is a place where our imaginations have free rein; somewhere that we can create, explore and share the music and stories we write as well as the magical worlds they are set in.
Together, we create short animated films and orchestral scores inspired by the beauty of the natural world with a fairytale twist. We pour our hearts into every detail to create charming characters, exquisite worlds and enchanting music scores that bring our carefully crafted stories to life.
In addition to our films and music, we also share studio diaries via our Blog and on our YouTube channel to give you a glimpse behind-the-scenes at our entire production process. So you can follow our progress and adventures from the initial idea through to the final cut and scored film.
We invite you to join us as we step into the fairytale worlds that live in our imaginations.
Thea and Graham ✨
Thea
Hi my name is Thea, I’m an artist and composer, amateur harpist and Alfie’s human.
In 2022, after a career in tech spanning nearly two decades I followed my heart and began working full time as an artist, animator and composer.
The catalyst for this change happened six years earlier in 2016, when I fulfilled a long-held dream and began learning to play the harp (little did I know at the time it was going to cause quite such a seismic shift in my life!). I fell completely in love with the instrument and it reignited the passion I had previously had for music when I was a child.
After a lot of practice and hard work I went on to study at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music in Dance in 2018, where I discovered an affinity for composing cinematic orchestral music for dance and film.
As a self-confessed bookworm, it wasn’t long until I began composing music inspired by my favourite fairytales and fantasy novels. At this point Graham began collaborating with me and it is also where the story of AYANE Studios begins…
Graham
Hi I’m Graham, I’m an amateur pianist and composer.
By day I work in tech, by night and at the weekends I help out with all things AYANE Studios.
I have always had aspirations to compose music. As a child I played the piano in several competitions but my love affair with music took a hiatus when I went to Cambridge University to study engineering and it continued for many years after completing my studies due to the time constraints of my career.
However encouraged by Thea’s rekindled love for music and inspired by her compositions, I started playing the piano again in 2018 and also began learning how to write music. I worked my way through Thea’s Trinity Laban assignments and soon began helping her with her compositions. As our pieces grew in complexity I started experimenting with DAWs, virtual instruments and sample libraries to improve the quality of our music production.
Adding this technology to our scoring process enabled us to be a lot more creative with our compositions and it also helped us to develop a much more cinematic sound. Which gave us another puzzle piece in the foundations of AYANE Studios…(It was also a good excuse to buy some new toys for our studio!)
AYANE sTUDIOS
Over the years our home studio has become our little sanctuary, a place where we can escape the real world and just create for the sheer joy of it. But it isn’t purely a music studio, as alongside our compositions we have also been filling sketchbooks with drawings, illustrations and paintings.
The inspiration for our projects and pieces has always been rooted in the natural world. Its vast ever changing beauty is a treasure trove of ideas and we thoroughly enjoy weaving together the magic of nature with references to ages old folklore, myth and fairytales to create music and art. Our epic woofle wanders over the years with our beloved dogs Alfie and Jasper have led us to discover so many beautiful hidden places that have fuelled our imaginations and inspired our creative endeavours.
When Covid hit in 2020 the various lockdowns and restrictions handed us the incredible opportunity to devote months of uninterrupted time to writing music and being creative. With the luxury of time, our ideas and projects grew and evolved hugely, expanding to include new threads and morphing into something much more interlinked and intricate. Eventually this led Thea to begin writing stories of her own as source material for our projects which quite literally opened up a whole new world of creativity to us…
As we explored this new world and way of working some really exciting new project ideas began to emerge from the pages of our notebooks and sketchbooks fuelled - we now realise - by Thea’s long filed away childhood dream of being a Disney animator and our shared life long love of film scores and classical music. Before we knew it we had the beginnings of several short animated film ideas/concepts scribbled down.
Prior to Covid Thea had been thinking for a long time about leaving her incredibly demanding job in tech to do something more creative and fulfilling, but she had never been quite brave enough to do so. However emboldened by her rekindled childhood dream - now evolved into the dream of running our own independent animation and music studio - and the excitement we both had for our new film project ideas she called time on her nearly twenty year career in February 2022 and set to work full time trying to figure out how to make our dreams, our reality.
Fast forward many, many months and lots of long discussions well into the wee hours and we had a plan for how to begin creating our own short animated films with full orchestral scores - which somehow crazily, makes total sense to us as it brings together everything we love and love to create. These projects are on a completely different scale to anything we’ve ever done before, and the desire to share them and other projects like them as we continue to grow as artists and creatives is what led us to found AYANE Studios and start our YouTube channel.
If you are curious about the name we have chosen for our studio, AYANE [ 彩音, pronounced eye-a-neh ] is a Japanese feminine name, which literally translated means colourful sound. We hope that in time, you’ll agree that this name suits us and what we do here nicely.