Shawn Clement Goes Digital, Never Looks Back
Shawn Clement battles vampires, gets chased by the police and saves Gotham. It's all in a days work for a film scoring master.
Shawn Clement is a graduate of the prestigious Berklee College of Music and has performed with a variety of musical greats, including Eddie Van Halen, Skunk Baxter, Harry Dean Stanton and B.B. King, but he's made his name as a composer for film and television and loves every minute of it.
"I write to pictures," Shawn maintains.
Shawn knew what he wanted to do with his life at the tender age of thirteen. The Milford, Massachusetts native started playing guitar at twelve but even then he knew that simply playing in a band wouldn't be enough for what he wanted to do. He wanted to write music for movies.
"I loved all music, from Zeppelin to Classical, my tastes in music go beyond a lot of borders," Clement explains. "Nothing against playing in a band, I've played in a lot of bands and had a great time, but to me it felt like there wasn't enough evolution. You'd spend a few months writing songs and the next couple years playing the same stuff, over and over. Too repetitive, for me. I wanted, even from an early age, to do a lot more with my music."
With this in mind, Shawn went west to Los Angeles and set his sights on scoring for film and television.
Scoring is intense, challenging and more importantly, diverse, the only way to really embrace all
styles of music," Clement adds. "When I was a kid, I'd watch movies on television and be listening
to the music behind them. I knew that's what I wanted to do, way back then, that was my dream.
Dream Not Reality
Shawn now lives his dream. As the composer for many top-rated network reality shows like "World's Wildest Police Videos", Shawn helped pioneer the definitive dramatic musical style of the reality genre. In recognition, ASCAP presented Clement with a film and television award for Most Performed Underscore in 2000. A multifaceted composer, Shawn's film credits include Karla (dir. Joel Bender), 2004: A Light Knight's Odyssey (with John Travolta, Samuel Jackson, Christian Slater, Michael York, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Anne Archer and James Earl Jones), Bad Girls From Valley High (with Christopher Lloyd), We Married Margo (Audience Favorite Award winner at the HBO/U.S. Comedy & Arts Festival with Kevin Bacon & Tom Arnold), and Last Chance (Best Original Drama winner at World Fest). He has also scored such television series as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Queer Eye for the Straight Girl, and I'm Still Alive. Shawn's acclaimed video game scores include Batman: Vengeance, Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu, Open Season for Sony and Kim Possible; What's The Switch for Disney.
Running my own studio, one thing I've learned is that simplicity is everything. The studio, the equipment, they're all a simple means to an end, a perfect conduit to the work I love to do.
But it wasn't all awards and acclaim in the beginning. Shawn lived the life of a starving artist when he first arrived.
The Mad Scramble
"I got here the same day the earthquake hit in '94," Shawn explains. "The work I had lined up to carry me until I got some music gigs had disappeared, destroyed along with building I would have been working in. I had to scramble. I went hungry for awhile and it wasn't fun, it's not nearly as romantic as it sounds, but I knew I was in the right place for what I wanted to do. Finally I got a mailroom job at Sony to sustain me and I networked like mad, I went to every industry event there was, meeting people and getting my name out there."
The networking paid off when Shawn got hired to write music for a Showtime series called Women and to score The Savage Dragon, an animated series, for Universal.
"I didn't have a studio when I started," Shawn says. "I had my guitar and a keyboard and that was it. I had to borrow studio space from people I knew. I'd borrow someone's studio on a night when it was dark or if they had few hours open here and there and I had to work fast because the clock would be ticking. There was a lot of pressure and never enough time. You definitely learn how to work under deadline like that. Plus, I was always in a new studio and had to take time to become familiar with what they had there. But the good thing was that I learned how to use a lot of different kinds of sound equipment efficiently."
Pages 1 | 2
Author
Joshua James
Joshua James is an accomplished New York playwright, director and writer.
Select TV Scores
- American Idol [Fox]
- Queer Eye for the Straight Girl [Bravo]
- Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica [MTV]
- The Osbournes [MTV]
- World's Scariest Police Chases - [Fox]
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer [Fox/Warner Bros.]
- Married With Children [Columbia]
- Jimmy Kimmel Live [ABC]
Select Game Scores
- The Sims 2 [Electronic Arts]
- Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu [Warner Bros.]
- Batman: Vengeance [Warmer Bros.]
- Need For Speed: Most Wanted [Electronic Arts]