Film Scoring 101: Faculty bios

About Donald Wilkins

Don Wilkins is the Chair of Berklee College of Music's Film Scoring Department. A graduate of Berklee (composition) and trained as a music editor in Hollywood, his experience in scoring and supervising music for film/video productions spans over thirty years. Hired to update and expand the original scoring courses at Berklee, he greatly expanded the Film Scoring program, adding new courses to the curriculum and overseeing the formation of this major field of study, now one of the largest at the college.

His professional credits include feature films, documentaries and series work for CBS (Hometown) and cable TV (Breaking Ground). He scored the music for the Academy Award nominee Urge to Build, and supervised the music on other nominated films including Academy Award winner Carl Hess: Toward Liberty. His expressive score for A City in Bloom, commissioned for the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston, was nominated for a New England Emmy.

A dedicated teacher and mentor, he has supervised the music of over 200-student film productions scored at Berklee and fostered the careers of many successful alumni in the film and television industry.

About Michael Rendish

Michael Rendish is the Assistant Chair of Berklee College of Music's Film Scoring Department. A gifted performer and award-winning writer, he has composed, orchestrated, and conducted some thirty film scores, including Faces of Freedom, A Place of Dreams, and Yorktown, and the five-part PBS series America by Design. He was the composer for Academy Award nominee, The Klan: A Legacy of Hate in America, and arranger and guest conductor of the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra of the 50th Jubilee Concert in honor of the King of Thailand. In his more than thirty-five years at Berklee, he has been continually active in developing much of the world's finest talent in contemporary popular music. He was the founding chair of Berklee's Harmony Department, and has authored and taught courses at all levels of traditional, contemporary, and jazz arranging/composition. He was also the founding chair of the electronic music program, the major that introduced music synthesis to Berklee. Michael's passion for harmony in contemporary music is the driving force behind the course "Getting Inside Harmony."

• Course Outline / Syllabus
• Requirements for Film Scoring 101

• Yes, I'm ready to enroll
• I'm interested and have a few questions