Way back in 2001, Andrew Lockington was orchestrating Jeff Danna's exquisite score for The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002), and in the passing years he's made the transition to composer, scoring a number of TV and theatrical projects, but New Line's expressive Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (2008) may be his best work - a richly harmonic, classically written fantasy/adventure score that is happily available as a downloadable album in North America, and as a CD and MP3 album via Europe's Silva Screen.

Andrew Lockington : I guess I'd always wanted to get into film. It seemed like some of the most interesting music was happening in film around the time that I was young and impressionable in the music world, so after studying composition at Wilfred Laurier University in Kitchener, Waterloo, I came to Toronto and did some jingle writing for a year and enjoyed that, but ultimately decided what I really wanted to do was film scoring.

So I did what a lot of young composers do - and I went around and talked to a bunch of film composers and other people in the music business, just to find out what are the secrets, how do I get involved, and one of the people I talked to was a composer named Mychael Danna, and he had just signed on for two films in a short period of time. Shortly after I met with him, he called me back and asked if I'd be interested in being an assistant and apprentice, so that was sort of my entry into film scoring.

Mark R. Hasan : One of the oddities of the Canadian film industry is that we depend on a lot of American productions and co-productions, but it's nice to know that there are enough working composers taking part in the apprentice system and helping new talent get their foot in the door. It's not as impossible to become a film composer as it seems.

AL : It's amazing how few young people I run into who are trying to do that... I had studied music at university, and I have to tell you I learned far more about film scoring and even composition in my experience of working on films with Mychael and with other composers as their orchestrator-conductor.

MRH : Did you find the years you spent orchestrating were probably the best training ground, because you tackled a lot of different genres at the time?

AL : I did. It's interesting to see how other composers tackle problems in film scoring, and what different peoples' techniques are; even in orchestrating you learn a lot about actually writing scores. There are techniques that are used in orchestrating that I often use in writing now as a composer.

You know, it's funny. One of the best things, as far as composition goes for me, was singing in a choir at Wilfrid Laurier University . There was a choir and it was part of the requirements for the music degree, and just singing all of these old pieces – singing the bass part, sometimes I'd sing the tenor or the baritone – [I'd see] how all of these different composers from all these different eras were writing four-part, sometimes five-part harmonies and chord progressions. I honestly learned so much about music just in that experience, and it ended up being a study without even realizing it was a study.