Originally published at: https://community.envato.com/blacksmith-wont-rest-hes-written-score-film/
Russian AudioJungle author Blacksmith came from a family of musicians. His parents were music teachers, his grandfather was a composer and his other grandfather was an opera singer. Therefore it’s not surprise they put him through music school as a child and that when he was 13 he started composing.
After finishing high school he went to university, to study choral conducting. But because it didn’t give him the opportunity to compose he eventually left the course and continued to write. After years of doing so on paper, he began composing using a computer in 2005 first using GuitarPRO, then Band-in-a-Box, FL Studio, Reason and finally Sonar which he’s still using today.
By 2010 he’d been writing using a computer for five years. Having made a whole bunch of compositions over that time he began thinking about what he was going to do with them all. “Sure, I was writing music but all of it was just sitting on a hard drive,” he tells me.
After reading a book his father had bought him about becoming a professional sound developer and building a home studio, he learned about the then burgeoning market for stock music which lead him to create an AudioJungle account.
He admits the first few things he released weren’t that great. “At the time my mixing skills weren’t that good…my tracks weren’t particularly commercially viable.”
“Freedom”, his first track, would be inspired by Red Dead Redemption on Play Station 3 and the films Appalousa, Train On Youma and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly among others.
Another, “Deadly Desert,” from around the same era was aiming to create a more ethnic vibe.
And then there is the very eery “Abandoned Castle,” inspired by pictures of Miranda Castle in Cell, Belgium.
“I didn’t quite understand what stock music was and I discovered quickly that my music wasn’t very commercial.”
But his understanding of what works on the marketplace would grow, and he was soon making money on AudioJungle while working from home in Volgograd (formerly Tsaritsyn), Russia where he grew up and earning in US dollars. “The last job I had paid only $200 a month.”
The flexibility of working on a marketplace has also given him the chance to indulge his passion for writing music for film.
Six years ago he started writing a musical about an old pirate locked in jail for twenty years. He shopped it around to studios including 20th Century Fox, Universal and Relativity - no one responded. “Probably because there are a lot of scripts like this. It’s not that unique,” he says.
While that particular project didn’t get picked up, it wouldn’t be the end of his film scoring career as a few years later he got the opportunity to write the score for a Ukrainian short film at the request of its director. “It’s a short fan-film about [a character from] The Witcher, Geralt Of Rivia,” he tells me. “It’s not finished yet, but there is a teaser on the web which uses my music,”. “The film does too. In fact one of the tracks is part of my portfolio.”
Regardless of how well the film ends up he’s really proud to have had the opportunity to compose for one, and hopes it’s not the last. “Maybe from this another director will offer me the chance to write.”
Between writing for film and producing stock music for AudioJungle, he’s got his hands full. Yet navigating the oddities of these two unique jobs can be challenging. “When my friends ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a sound engineer or musician or something like that,” he says. “It’s strange doing a job that nobody quite understands.”
His success on the market has continued to grow, now his job is to sustain the upwards trajectory. Yet while he attempts to take his stock music career to the next level, he still still hopes to one day fulfill his lifelong dream. “I’m working hard composing everyday, and hoping one day I may achieve my main goal: writing music for films…until then, my work is not yet done.”
I hope this times will come 
