Andrew Hewitt
bafta nominated composer, los angeles
12-week live online course
for filmmakers & composers
Andrew Hewitt BAFTA Nominated Composer - course leader
Most courses on filmmaking and music for film teach tools or techniques in pre-recorded videos. ​Yet sonic production values mean little unless the ideas expressed are psychologically and cinematically insightful. The composer must be experienced as a co-filmmaker.
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The Composer's Voice is 100% live and interactive, and we focus on cultivating something far more important: the dramatic and interpretive role of music in cinema.
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We explore the narrative stance a score can take inside a film’s world, and the sensibility that allows it to speak uniquely from within the drama - rather than simply accompany it.
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​Over twelve weeks, a small group of participants work in a focused, high-trust space. Together we examine how music embodies the inner nature of a film - how score aligns with, reveals, disguises, fractures, or fulfills the psychological truth within a narrative world. Through these explorations, your sense of how to think and talk about where score is positioned - how to articulate its dramatic stance - becomes sharper, deeper, and more personal.
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Between group sessions, weekly private 1:1 conversations offer space for anything that concerns your thinking, artistry, psychology, and cinematic sensibility - the interior ground from which your choices about music in film emerge.​​
Who This Is For
1
Production Capable
You’re already working to picture – as a director, writer, producer, editor, composer. You have your own setup, musical or cinematic, and are not seeking technical instruction. What feels under-developed is what music can say: its interpretive stance and power in a dramatic world.
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Seeking Growth
Typical participants are post-graduate, early to mid career filmmakers, composers, and musicians, seeking to deepen the inner identity, function, psychological stance, and cinematic sensibility of their musical vision.
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Independent Learner
You prefer mature listening, analysis, and debate about cinema, character, and inner life over software tutorials. You are creating - and sense there is far more of your personal voice, dramatic instinct, and psychological responsiveness waiting to emerge - whether you write or deploy music.
Weekly Course Structure
1
12 x 90 min group webinars
Each Monday The Composer’s Voice examines the interior stance of two contrasting film scores. We place these into direct dialogue - listening for how music's co-authorial voice creates or subverts cinematic meaning across disparate narrative, stylistic, psychological, and genre contexts.
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12 x 30 min private sessions
Between group sessions, each participant will have a weekly 1:1 session with the course leader. These twelve private discussions can focus on a project in progress, artistic identity, and the cinematic and psychological process of developing a personal, interpretive voice for film - as composer or filmmaker.
3
12 x 60 min group discussions
Each Friday session is an optional group discussion: an open space to reflect on that week's scores or films participants may bring, and the narrative stances these illuminate - along with associated questions, struggles, discoveries - in a relaxed but serious, artistically developmental setting.
I trained first as a classical performer, and after graduating with a MA in Music from Cambridge University, won a scholarship to London's Guildhall School of Music & Drama. As a singer I performed hundreds of concerts and opera with leading ensembles worldwide, including in the soundtracks to The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Star Wars Prequels.
I have scored twenty feature films across a range of orchestral, electronic, and hybrid textures, and received a BAFTA Nomination for my television work. My film scores include The Double, Submarine, It's What's Inside, The Stanford Prison Experiment, Bill, Villains, Mojave, The Brass Teapot, We Have Always Lived In The Castle, and The Sea. I have orchestrated, conducted, and produced all my scores.
I am an invited member of BAFTA, the World Soundtrack Academy, and an Associate Member PRS. I have also completed courses at the British Institute of Psychoanalysis, giving me further unique insights into the subtle psychological challenges of musical voice in film. I have taught privately and on the Thinkspace MA and MFA courses in film scoring.
I hold dual American and British citizenship, and live in Los Angeles, CA.
Preview - 3 Score Comparisons
sincere myth / self-aware irony
interior mentality / exterior world
simulated / authentic intimacy
We contrast the sincere myth-making of Star Wars - where the music inherently believes in heroism - with the subversive, self-aware wit of Die Hard. We examine how Kamen refuses to score the protagonist, instead celebrating the antagonist while winking deconstructively at the audience.
We juxtapose the deeply intimate psychology of Shore's score for Clarice - painting the autumnal, painful, interior landscape of a single mind - against the exteriorizing industrial sounds of Terminator 2. We explore how Fiedel’s inorganic metallic palette embodies the film's plot-problem, subsuming the fate of souls within the primary fate of a civilization.
We compare the performative intimacy of Newton Howard's music that seductively embodies the sheen of Lou’s detachment and simulated need - with the quiet, emotionally truthful intimacy of Elliot and ET. Williams honestly paints the genuine, tender bond between two beings who accept their need for one another.
Stuart Cornfeld
Red Hour Films
Producer The Fly, The Elephant Man
As Executive Producers of Submarine, Ben Stiller and I were overjoyed with Andrew's score. He could create anything that was needed for the drama, and he moved so effortlessly between different styles, that we were bowled over by his technical skill alone.
Dr Tom Schneller, PhD Professor of Music
Cornell University
It is indeed a rare composer who can develop a score so perfectly suited to its film. Andrew
is unquestionably an artist of the highest caliber and his music has helped bring many
films to life. Like Bernard Herrmann, I consider Andrew to be a true artist, of which there are very few in the commercial world of film music.
Dr Mitchell Morris, PhD Professor of Musicology UCLA
It is not common to find a gifted composer who is as insightful and articulate as Andrew - his scholarly level and rigor is high. He is sensitive to the complex situation of sound within a score, to crucial details of plot and gesture, and deft at weaving critical insights into a consideration of psychological mise-en-scène.
Luc Roeg
CEO Independent Film
Producer We Need To Talk About Kevin
Andrew's music directly impacted the success and drama of The Sea. We were very lucky to have him. This was a highly sensitive and dramatically subtle film, and he proved himself a consummate artist, working at the top of his game.
George Fenton
Oscar Nominated Composer, Gandhi, The Fisher King, Dangerous Liaisons
Andrew holds a reputation of excellence within the industry. His compositional skill and dramatic sense work in tandem, to produce scores truly crucial to the world of each film, in bespoke and tailored ways. Andrew announces himself with a clear artistic voice, and with fresh and bold vision.
Paul Haslinger
Grammy/Emmy Nominated Composer,
Underworld, Tangerine Dream
Andrew is a composer of rare single-minded passion and dedication to cinema and film-music. His scores are of the highest quality, in both technical and artistic terms. His versatility, depth, and intelligence mark him out with ease among his peers.
Course
Fee
Individual & Institutional rates
TBD
12 Weeks
​A single up-front fee covers:
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12 x 90m Weekly group video seminars
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12 x 60m Weekly group video discussions
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12 x 30m Private 1:1 video sessions
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Access to all shared materials and recordings
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Discord channel
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Payment requested only after your application has been reviewed and accepted.
Additional 1:1 sessions may be arranged by mutual agreement, availability, and rate.
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Full weekly content and pricing detailed on application.
Apply Now
Please complete this form to apply for the course.
Places are limited.
We review all applications personally, to ensure The Composer's Voice will be of real benefit to you.