About me

Brett AplinI am an AFI and Australian Screen Music Award winning screen composer, known for my diversity and ability to craft scores that seamlessly enhance the narrative of film.

A classically trained pianist, I won the 2000 Annual Pete Carpenter Fellowship (BMI Foundation, NYC) and travelled to Los Angeles to work with Emmy and Grammy award-winning television composer Mike Post, where I composed music for Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

I have since focused on working with some of Australia’s leading documentary film makers, including scoring the award winning Ten Pound Poms, Rare Chicken Rescue, The Shadow of Mary Poppins and The Floating Brothel. I have also worked internationally having recently scored the feature length drama-documentary Secrets of the Forbidden City for the BBC and The History Channel, and the documentary series Inside John Lewis for the BBC.

In 2010 I completed work on my first feature film Surviving Georgia starring Pia Miranda, Holly Valance, Shane Jacobson and Caroline O’Connor for directors Sandra Sciberras and Kate Whitbread (Caterpillar Wish), and completed the score for the 4-part documentary series The Making of Modern Australia for the ABC.

This last year I lent my talents to the National Geographic documentary films Pelicans: Outback Nomads and the highly decorated The Worm Hunters, and was music editor on the feature documentary The Curse of the Gothic Symphony for the Melbourne International Film Festival. I also scored the fabulous natural history documentary Tiger Dynasty for Animal Planet and the Natural World program on BBC2.

I have been nominated for three APRA / Australian Guild of Screen Composers Awards, twice for Best Music for a Documentary for The Floating Brothel (2007) and Secrets of the Forbidden City (2008), and winning Best Music for a Short Film last year for Lucy Wants to Kill Herself (2009). I was awarded an AFI for my work on Rare Chicken Rescue in 2008, and was also nominated the acclaimed documentary A Thousand Encores: the Ballets Russes in Australia (2010)

Jan 2012