A multi award-winning Gibraltarian composer based in London, Holly Buhagair specialises in crafting bespoke scores for film, TV and Games. She has worked on a plethora of projects for shorts, feature length films and series alongside Grammy and Academy Award winning engineers in the finest studios across London. Completing a first-class honours degree in music production at Leeds College of Music, Hollie continued and completed a Masters at the National Film and Television School. In her career to date, Hollie has worked for the likes of Amazon, Sky, Channel 4, BFI, NOWNESS, Creative England, Tate, The Guardian, Film London, VICE and BBC. Her works have received critical acclaim winning various awards, including a Porsche Award, a Gold British Arrow and the McLaren Award for Best British Animation, as well as being a two time Unity Awards nominee. Hollie also produced the score for the 2018 British Short Animation BAFTA winning film – Poles Apart.
Consistently throughout her career, Hollie has been praised for her distinctive and unique sonic expressions, as well as her skills to create awe-inspiring scores that approach traditional composition from a refreshing and exciting perspective.
Hollie spoke of her recent and upcoming projects, including quite a few that she couldn’t discuss, including “several features and something really wonderful for Netflix”. Hollie recently had the joy of scoring ‘CRADLED’ by Chlöe Wicks for Channel 4’s BAFTA winning anthology series ‘On the Edge’, alongside two other beautiful films. Buhagiar also recently wrote the music for a sports series for Sky and an animation short called ‘Bug Therapy’ by Jason Reisig.
Buhagiar’s sonic thumbprint is certainly unique, with a lot of the timbral qualities of her music feeling extremely original. Hollie “forges a lot of them electroacoustically out of personally recorded found sounds”. In addition to this, the development of her vocals and the different palettes within its range have quite literally contributed to the creation of her own sonic voice as a composer. It’s extremely rare that Hollie will use a sample in its original form. She has also had to explore varying ways of processing different instruments that contribute to her sound. Engineering and mixing to Hollie, are all part of the compositional process.
When composing for image, Hollie “could never have foreseen just how much they (vocalism and songwriting pairing with visual mediums) would intertwine down the line”. Many times in Hollie’s career, there has been a need for diegetic pieces that require a more pre-existing sound and it’s fundamental to her to have that foundation of knowledge and understanding about what allows a track to feel genuine, from compositional elements through to engineering and mixing. Hollie attributes Leeds Conservatoire for this – “I most definitely attribute a lot of my knowledge of these skills to the institute, the close proximity you are given with the other students and courses was an education in itself.”