Here’s why Jaimie Pangan is a film composer you’ll want to hear
Film composers don’t receive nearly enough credit for their contributions to our favorite films. Creating, arranging, composing and directing original scores for various forms of media, studio composers set the mood for our most emotional scenes, heightening our experience with the movie as a whole.
Up and coming composer Jaimie Pangan is already impacting the landscape of modern films. The 26-year-old Filipino composer has been nominated in the Contemporary Classical/Instrumental category of the Hollywood Music in Media Awards (HMMA) for her composition “Farewell”.
We wanted to know more about one of the newest names in film composition, so we got the scoop from Jaimie herself.
How does someone become a film composer?
Born and raised in the Philippines, Jaimie has been playing the violin since she was six years old but didn’t fall in love with music until high school. While she considered attending college for music, she ended up getting her degree in Information Technology and taking a job at IBM.
In her first year of working as an IT Specialist, a close friend introduced Jaimie to minimalist/ambient composer Max Richter. This opened her up to a whole new instrumental world and Jaimie first found herself looking into composition. After dabbling in composition, she learned about film scoring and decided to pursue it.
Jaimie Pangan first went through the film scoring summer program at New York University in 2017 with a full scholarship from the SOREL organization. Eager to learn about the art more, she fully pursued it through the prestigious Master of Music in Screen Scoring program at the University of Southern California, which was ranked as one of the top film scoring schools according to The Hollywood Reporter.
What kinds of projects does a new film composer work on?
Jaimie has had the opportunity to work within a variety of platforms. She composed the score for the VR game The Space Between, about Aster, a young woman who is tasked with completing a video game, sent to her by her high school best friend, who had long ago disappeared.
She also worked on Los Pollitos, a short film produced in Los Angeles, California about a desperate mother who trusts a childhood friend to smuggle her and her family into the United States, but her friend has an agenda of his own. What began as a pilgrimage of hope becomes a game of survival, and one man is holding all the cards.
Jaimie Pangan’s music is also featured in Within Their Gates a short documentary produced in Los Angeles, California. It is about a Japanese American Concentration Camp survivor, Yukio Shimomura, who recounts the horrors of his captivity during World War II and its relation to our current political climate.
What’s next for Jaimie Pangan
While Jaimie Pangan can write music for a variety of genres, there is something about drama and horror/thriller scores that excite her the most. She also enjoys hybrid compositions (synths mixed with live instruments) and will be releasing the music she’s composing now on different music streaming platforms such as Spotify, and Apple Music.
Currently, in the middle of numerous short film projects such as the horror-comedy short film The Ghost Annoyers, Filipino short film Hiraya, and drama romance short film Ageusia, Jaimie was also commissioned for a TV series called After Life that will be streamed under a major entertainment company, Cignal Entertainment, in the Philippines. She will also do some scoring for a feature documentary called Cap Up: The Water Polo Story.
