We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Markus Siegel. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Markus below.
Markus, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
The most meaningful projects I have worked on so far have been the upcoming movie Harold and the Purple Crayon made by Sony Pictures and Ataturk a TV show focusing on the life of Mustafa Kemal, the founder of modern day Turkey. On both of those projects I was hired as additional music composer, contributing music to some fantastic visual storytelling. As an up and coming composer, getting the opportunity to work on such big projects in a musical capacity is a big chance to showcase my creative sensibilities and build relationships that will allow me to continue improving the quality of my work.
Other projects I have been a part of are M3GAN, STILL: A Michael J. Fox Movie and MIGRATION, an upcoming Illumination movie. All of these projects have given me the opportunity to learn everything about the industry, how to be part of a music department team and exactly what the process is in delivering the highest quality score.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I am a composer of music for film and television. I started out scoring short films and writing production music but my real goal was to eventually work on studio movies writing big orchestral music. I was lucky enough to be able to do an internship at 5 Cat Studios, owned by John Powell and even luckier to have the opportunity to stay and work there full time. That’s where I really started to understand how the industry works at the highest level and how to score movies of the highest caliber.
My main interest as a composer is to create music that adds a level of depth to stories that films alone cannot do. I try to find the main themes of the movie from a story point of view and use them to create melodies and textures based on that. I believe music in movies can and should be more than just a background element so I always want my music to be strong enough to be effective away from the screen as well as standalone pieces of music.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
The main part of my job as a film composer is problem solving and figuring out the best way to tell the story through music. The most rewarding aspect of this career is finding the right melodies and the right harmonies to tell the story successfully. When that happens and people connect with that music, it feels incredibly rewarding and it gives you enough energy to continue creating. I suppose that is the other incredibly rewarding part of being an artist. Sharing your work with people and inspiring them to create their own art and their own music is a great feeling.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
Keep enjoying art, film and music and see it as more than just a product. With the amount of content being created on streaming platforms in particular whether that is in the film industry or music industry, find the kind of artist that you really connect with and the kind of music that you really like and support those creatives. Tell other people about them, share their social media posts and continue listening to their music or watching their movies. That sort of support will keep them going and they will keep growing.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://markussiegel.co.uk
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markus.siegel.music/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/siegel.markus.christian