It all began when I was a little boy...
My parents met as amateur filmmakers, and as far back as I can remember, the house was full of projectors, movie-making equipment, books, magazines and the films themselves. When I went to school, my knowledge for movies heavily outweighed anything they taught me in the classroom.
I therefore grew up into a love for cinema, which turned into passion.
Running on a parallel track was my passion for music. I got my first guitar at the age of six and I started writing songs. Then I started joining bands and learning new instruments. Then I studied music production and went on to learn more instruments, perform with other bands and record many tracks.
As I launch this site today, 3rd March 2015, I regularly play seven instruments. I have written over 200 songs and composed over 300 pieces of music, which span across everything from filmscore, television, radio, games, theater and various other projects one would need accompanying music.
Over the years my parents also exposed me to legions of music, most particularly the Beatles and movie soundtracks. At 14 years of age I could watch a movie and tell you who composed it just by hearing it. It was a cool party trick to announce "Music by Jerry Goldsmith!" before it appeared on the screen.
My first 'dabbling' in filmscore happened around the same time. As a young teenager I was obsessed with making a volcano movie. All I could really do was storyboard it and compose themes for it - so that's exactly what I did!
Not too long after that I composed music for a big stage production by my church, which lead into doing music for some dance companies to be used in the theater. My next couple of gigs came only once I finished school, and it happened when a computer-gaming school friend of mine secured the rights from Sony to create a PlayStation 3 game - for the first time in South Africa! It was a fantasy fighting game, so I blended a lot of synthy sounds with traditional music.
I then got to do some radio jingles and some PSA videos, as well as a short 'making of' video.
But my first big moment came when I was asked to score South Africa's first feature-length Afrikaans horror film. I stayed up late nights and spent a lot of time with the director and the producers to get specific themes going for each character. It was great fun and I actually composed a lot more than what was needed, so I still have plenty of unused material from that project that could be tweaked and potentially used for other projects.
And of course in between all of that I compose music just for the love of it. I sometimes challenge myself and try to recreate famous pieces of music from memory, which usually ends up being just a couple of oboes and a trombone off the mark, but great fun nonetheless.
My desire in all of this is to use the talent that I believe God gave me to make music that is stirring, inspiring and marries the images on the screen in such a way as to enhance the experience.
Enjoy
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