Today’s post is an introduction to Scott Benzie, composer of Soul Searcher, The Dark Side of the Earth and now Stop/Eject. (The series on VFX planning will continue next week.)

After becoming interested in music at a relatively late age, thanks to a synthesizer Christmas present and the inspiration of James Horner’s Krull soundtrack, Scott majored in music at Notthingham Trent University. In 2002 he wrote an impressive orchestral score for Jim Groom’s noir feature Room 36, conducting the Westminster Philharmonic Orchestra and recording all 50 minutes of music in a single day. Scott repeated this feat for Soul Searcher three years later, after responding to an advert I posted on Shooting People for a fully orchestral John Williams-style score – a goal which many people mocked as naïve or over-ambitious, but not Scott.

The composer’s other feature film credits include Ten Dead Men (dir. Ross Boyask), Fear Eats the Seoul (dir. Nick Calder), and Dinner with my Sisters (dir. Michael Hapeshis) which was released in UK cinemas last November. Several of Scott’s soundtracks have been released in their own right, including Room 36 which is available on CD from KeepMoving Records.

Scott recently took his first crack at some music for Stop/Eject and this is the result:

This is rough, unmixed and all done with samples. The finished version will, I hope, be recorded with live players. On Soul Searcher  we were able to persuade a choir and a symphony orchestra to perform Scott’s score for us. Here’s a clip from Going to Hell: The Making of Soul Searcher covering the music recording, one of the few things that didn’t go horribly wrong during Soul Searcher’s creation. (Remember that you can watch Going to Hell in full for a small charge at neiloseman.com/soulsearcher and Soul Searcher itself completely free on the same site.)

Visit Scott’s website at www.scottbenzie.co.uk