How a funeral, a 4 a.m. alarm, and a French horn led to the score that rewrote the story of the first Americans.
Documentary · Directed by Olive TalleyBest Music — The Archaeology Channel IFFWorld Premiere — Austin Film Festival
The Film
A man, a site, and twenty thousand years
Archaeologist Dr. Michael B. Collins spent his life challenging the accepted story that the Clovis people were the first in the Americas. At the Gault Site in Central Texas, he believed the ground held proof that people were here thousands of years earlier — and he bet his career, and eventually his own money, on being right.
Director Olive Talley spent years piecing his story together out of hours of footage, until the film stopped being about an archaeologist's work and became a portrait of the man himself. This score — delivered in 5.1 surround, as one continuous piece of music — won Best Music at The Archaeology Channel International Film Festival.
Listen: the Orchestral Suite drawn from the score's themes. The film itself is streaming on Apple TV, Amazon, and Google Play.
Ray Tells It
The Dig
Six chapters, told the way it happened — descending, like the excavation itself.
Surface — Grand Prairie, Texas
CHAPTER ONE
The Spark
I played piano at my step-grandmother's funeral. She was an amazing woman, and it wasn't a sad day so much as a celebration of her life — music has such wonderful healing properties, and it was a gift I could give the family.
At the reception, my step-brother Jeremy mentioned what he'd been up to: digitizing years of old news footage for a documentary being made here in Texas. The producer was Olive Talley. I looked her up that night and was immediately blown away by her body of work. Jeremy gave me her email. I wrote to her. She wrote back.
Layer One — The Lunch
CHAPTER TWO
The Legitimacy Tour
I had a plan. Lunch at The Reata in downtown Fort Worth — and afterward, a casual tour of the Four Day Weekend theatre, where, coincidentally (not coincidentally), there are posters of me everywhere. She'd think I was legit. That was the strategy, and I'm not ashamed of it.
Olive brought her editor, and over lunch she told me about Mike Collins and the Gault Site. Somewhere in that conversation, Olive mentioned that she used to play the French horn.
I went home and could not stop thinking about it. I loved Olive. I loved this story.
The handshake. Ray & Olive, September 2023 — the day the job became real.
First Light — 4:00 A.M.
CHAPTER THREE
The 4 A.M. Track
The next morning I woke up at 4 a.m. with one goal: have a piece of music inspired by Mike's story sitting in Olive's inbox by 8.
Here's the strange part. I had a track I'd written years earlier — a piece that never fit any project, just sitting on a shelf, waiting. For whatever reason, it fit this story perfectly. And I was a little sneaky: the piece opens with a beautiful solo French horn.Her instrument. The first sound she would hear.
I sent it at 8 a.m. By noon, Olive called and offered me the job. She told me she was in tears — that she could see the entire opening of her film with that music playing. She had interviews scheduled that week with two other established composers. She cancelled both of them.
That track still opens the film.
Music has such wonderful healing properties.
Why Ray played the funeral
The Clovis Layer — 13,500 Years
CHAPTER FOUR
Two Years of Digging
Most composers arrive after picture-lock, when the film is finished changing. Not this time. Olive loves to make changes — and honestly, the film deserved them. She spent years shaping the story until it became a portrait of Mike himself, and I scored it part-time across the whole journey — edit after edit, version after version. It was crazy. It was also the most fun I've ever had. Lots of laughs. Lots of tears.
The Quiet Years — Nothing Found
CHAPTER FIVE
The Music
I built the score on two themes. The first is the one from that 4 a.m. morning — the opening. It belongs to the search.
The second theme is Mike's — and I wouldn't let it be whole. Every time it appears early in the film, something is wrong with it on purpose: a minor key, a harmony that won't resolve. Because he hadn't found it yet. Three years of digging at Gault turned up nothing beneath the Clovis layers. The theme stays incomplete while the man stays incomplete.
It even turns up in disguise — the same theme played on a solo banjo, where it just sounds old-timey, like something drifting off a porch a century ago. Same melody, work clothes. Still not the finished thing.
Then comes the day. A member of the dig team finds it: a projectile point, a gorgeous gray-blue color, poking out of the dirt. Twenty thousand years old. Proof. Mike had spent his entire life looking for that point. She asked him if he wanted to dig it out himself.
He just wanted to watch.
Mike Collins, at the moment of discovery
That is where the full theme finally arrives — complete, resolved, and on the French horn.
Ray with Ashley Lemke — Collins's protégée, now a renowned archaeologist — outside the State Theatre at the Austin Film Festival premiere.
The score also hands Mike's melody to Ashley Lemke — the one student in a visiting class who actually took Mike up on his offer to volunteer, now a renowned archaeologist in her own right. In the music, his theme rises in her. That's not symbolism for its own sake; that's what actually happened in their lives. And underneath it all, descending timpani reach down toward bedrock — the music digging, layer by layer, the way they did.
Bedrock — 20,000 Years
CHAPTER SIX
First Place, Out of 75 Films
Olive told me herself. The score had won Best Music at The Archaeology Channel International Film Festival. I read it about ten times. Does that actually say I won first? There were 75 films.
I would give anything to work with Olive again. High level, the whole way — and fun, fun, fun while we did it.
From the Journey
Moments from the road this film took — all from Ray's own posts along the way.
Premiere DayRay under the State Theatre marquee, Austin Film Festival — October 2024.Composer & DirectorRay with Olive Talley during the festival run.USA Film FestivalRay and Olive with the poster in Dallas — April 2025.Theater 2Ray at a festival screening.In the LobbyThe festival poster standee — “What he found there changed history.”The Man HimselfMike Collins on the big screen, mid-screening.The Credit“Composer — Ray Sharp,” as the audience saw it.The Mix StageHearing the score in 5.1 surround — May 2024.Export Day“Stereo mix & 9 more” — the score leaves the studio, April 30, 2024.
The Film, In Brief
The site: the Gault Site, near Florence, Texas — one of the richest Paleoindian sites in the Americas, on Buttermilk Creek.
The proof: the Gault Assemblage — stone tools found beneath the Clovis layer, dated to roughly 16,000–20,000 years ago (published in Science Advances, 2018).
The scale: some 2.6 million artifacts recovered — from only about 3% of the site.
The rescue: after years of looting as a pay-to-dig site, Collins bought the 30 acres himself in 2007 and donated it to the Archaeological Conservancy.
The honor: the Gault research was named one of the Archaeological Institute of America's Top 10 Discoveries of 2018.
The film: written, produced, and directed by Olive Talley; narrated by John McCaa; cinematography by Chris McCaffrey and Matthew Franklin; edited by J Hutton, with David Maddox on the final edit. Streaming on Apple TV, Amazon, and Google Play.
Festival Honors
Best Music — by Jury
The Archaeology Channel International Film Festival (2025)
Honorable Mention — Best Film
Honorable Mention — Narration
Honorable Mention — Script
Honorable Mention — Cinematography
Honorable Mention — Public Education Value
Honorable Mention — Inspiration
Audience Favorite
Audience Favorite — Feature Film
Arkhaios Cultural Heritage & Archaeology Film Festival (2025)
Honorable Mention — Best Archaeology Feature Film (Arkhaios)
Honorable Mention — Grand Prize of Arkhaios 2025
“The jury really liked this one, particularly for the way it treated archaeology through a biographical lens.” — Arkhaios jury
Your Film Here
Every score has a story. Let's write yours.
Ray scores narrative films and documentaries the way this one was scored — from the story out, with deliberate melody and themes that mean something. If you're making a film, he'd like to hear about it.
