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About STEFFEN SCHMIDT

Steffen Schmidt is a composer based in Los Angeles creating scores for video games, VR, and film. His music has been featured at top festivals, including the 75th and 81st Venice Film Festival and Cannes. Recent credits range from the cozy MMO Palia to the thriller feature House of Abraham, with a stylistic range that runs from luminous, melodic orchestral writing to dark, pulse-driven thriller textures.

Steffen records with world-class players at Abbey Road Studio One, Vienna Synchron Stage, and Ocean Way Nashville, from intimate chamber scoring to large cinematic ensembles. A collaborator at heart, he focuses on clear themes, modern production, and tight narrative alignment—so the score not only sounds beautiful, it moves the story.

BACKGROUND

OREGON

Steffen Schmidt hails from the green state of Oregon, where he began playing violin at age five and soon joined the Metropolitan Youth Symphony of Portland—later becoming a featured alum in its 50th season. Classically trained and seasoned by two international tours before attending the University of Oregon, Steffen built a foundation that naturally led to his career as a composer for film, games, and immersive media.

LOS ANGELES

Since 2015, Steffen has been based in Los Angeles. He first started out as an assistant for well established composer(s) and musicians like Tina Guo, Michael Patti, and the crew at Cinesamples & Hollywood Scoring. After a couple years passed , Steffen has been working as a sole composer with his own studio.

SEOUL

With a strong personal history and cultural attachment to South Korea, Steffen spent a year in Seoul after graduating Berklee in 2013. During his time there, he became familiar with the film & TV industry, developing relationships with filmmakers and VR developers. Working on Korean projects is always special to Steffen and has an ongoing relationship in the Korean entertainment industry and calls Seoul his "home away from home".

INFLUENCES

JERRY GOLDSMITH

Other than being a phenomenal composer, Steffen has always been impressed with Jerry's unique approach on so many of his scores, having it be unique instrumentation or orchestration choices, to even Jerry's sense of minimalism in certain moments while reaching such intense emotion.

Hayao Miyazaki

While not being a musical influence, Hayao Miyazaki has had a profound impact as a creative mind and role model in terms of the level of dedication he puts into his work. Aside from watching his phenomenal films, Steffen has studied various documentaries and other stories about Studio Ghibli's co-founder and has been able to learn not just about his process, but also how Miyazaki-san handles various struggles that come about during production and uses that energy to complete a project successfully.

Nobuo Uematsu

Having grown up with video games, it is only natural that composers from that medium would be an influence. Nobuo Uematsu has been another major influence for Steffen in his ongoing journey as a composer, especially in video games. The power of melody telling a story is one of Uemastu's greatest strengths and has been the standard for Steffen to follow.