Born and raised in Germany,
Patrick Kirst is a well-respected composer for visual media in Los Angeles. In 2007, Patrick became an integral part of Aaron Zigman's team where he earned credits on top-grossing films such as
The Proposal (Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds),
The Ugly Truth (Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler),
Sex and the City: The Movie,
Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (Dustin Hoffman and Natalie Portman), and
The Shack, to name only a few. Through these contributions and his ongoing work in indie films, documentaries and other feature films, Kirst was discovered and hired to write music for Disney's first nature documentary,
Earth, based on the BBC's highly successful Planet Earth TV series. The composer scored
The Kissing Booth and
The Kissing Booth 2, a commercial success featured on Netflix.
Falling in love with film music as a child, Patrick Kirst decided to study music at the classical conservatory in Germany. In 2000, he left the country to study jazz at Berklee College of Music in Boston, later moving to New York to pursue contemporary classical music at New York University, and relocating to study film music at USC Thornton School of Music after. As well as scoring for motion pictures, Patrick teaches film composition and technology at the USC Thornton School of Music.
1. Speeding up the process When I shared my decision to take a gap year with Patrick, he said that taking a year off is a great opportunity to study music and do other things. "There are certain things that you can't speed up: life experience, maturing in musical style, just those things that take time, and they take about 10 years to really mature," Patrick tells me. Even when it comes to film scoring, it requires a long period of time in order to master the craft and be taken seriously by directors.
After completing his undergraduate education in Germany, Kirst himself made the decision to study at Berklee when he was 27. Taking three semesters of classes, he then studied at NYU for another year, before settling on USC Thornton's Screen Scoring graduate program.