South Africa Oscar Entry ‘Variations on a Theme’ Made With Excel

The Unusual Tool Behind the Score

When the Academy announced the shortlist for this year’s Best International Feature Film, few expected a story about spreadsheets. South Africa’s entry, Variations on a Theme, not only earned a place among the world’s most celebrated movies, it also revealed a groundbreaking method of composition: the entire soundtrack was written in Microsoft Excel.

Director and co writer Devon Delmar explained to The Hollywood Reporter that the decision was born out of curiosity and a desire to challenge traditional workflows. The film’s narrative, which explores recurring patterns in personal history, mirrored the grid‑like structure of a spreadsheet, making Excel an oddly fitting canvas.

How Excel Was Turned Into a Musical Workspace

Excel is known for calculations, budgets and data analysis, but its cells can also store numbers that correspond to musical notes. The team used a combination of formulas, conditional formatting and macro scripts to translate numeric data into MIDI signals.

Key steps in the process

• Assign each column to a specific instrument such as piano, strings or percussion.
• Enter note values in rows, using numbers that represent pitch and duration.
• Apply a formula that converts these numbers into a format readable by digital audio workstations.
• Run a macro that exports the data as a MIDI file, which is then imported into a DAW for mixing.

This workflow allowed the composers to experiment with patterns quickly. Changing a single cell could alter an entire phrase, offering a level of flexibility that traditional notation software sometimes lacks.

Collaboration Across Continents

While Devon Delmar led the project, an Estonian composer contributed additional layers that gave the score its distinctive atmosphere. The Estonian music scene is renowned for blending folk motifs with modern electronic textures, a quality that complemented the film’s thematic focus.

Delmar shared with BFI London Film Festival representatives that the partnership began through a virtual workshop. The Estonian composer sent Excel files that were instantly editable, allowing both parties to iterate in real time despite the distance.

Benefits of the Excel approach for remote teamwork

1. All files are stored in a universally accessible format.
2. Version control is simple; each change is logged in the spreadsheet’s history.
3. Collaborators can comment directly on cells, providing precise feedback.

This method proved especially useful during the pandemic, when traditional studio sessions were limited.

Reception at the BFI London Film Festival

The film premiered at the BFI London Film Festival, where audiences and critics alike noted the innovative score. Reviewers highlighted how the music’s repetitive motifs echoed the film’s visual storytelling, creating a cohesive sensory experience.

One critic from The Guardian wrote that the soundtrack felt “as if the film itself were a living spreadsheet, each cell a moment of memory waiting to be calculated.”

The festival’s programming director praised the project for “pushing the boundaries of what technology can achieve in cinematic art.”

What This Means for Future Film Scoring

The success of Variations on a Theme may inspire other composers to explore unconventional tools. Microsoft has already highlighted the project on its official blog, noting that Excel’s versatility extends far beyond business applications.

By demonstrating that a spreadsheet can serve as a full‑featured composition platform, the film challenges the industry to rethink the relationship between technology and creativity. It also opens doors for musicians who may not have access to expensive notation software but are comfortable with familiar office tools.

Future projects might incorporate other everyday applications, turning word processors, presentation software or even data‑visualisation tools into artistic instruments. The key lesson is that creativity often thrives when constraints are reimagined as opportunities.

As the Oscar race continues, the story of Variations on a Theme reminds us that innovation can appear in the most unexpected places, and that the language of music can be written in cells as well as staffs.