How to Train your Dragon with Live Orchestra

Nicholas Buc is an award-winning composer, conductor, and arranger with more than 20 years of experience in the music industry. He has composed for film, television, and the concert hall, with some of his work being screened at festivals and theaters across Australia, Asia, and the United States. As the recipient of the Brian May Scholarship, he completed a master’s degree in scoring for film and multimedia at New York University, receiving the Elmer Bernstein Award for Film Scoring.

Buc recently completed work on the new Australian feature film Slant, starring Sigrid Thornton and Pia Miranda, which won Best Australian Feature at Monster Fest 2022. He also scored the Ukrainian documentary Slava, which won Best Short Film at Byron All Shorts Flickerfest 2023.

He has worked with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, Chris Botti, Amanda Palmer, Ben Folds, and Tina Arena. Buc has written arrangements for Birds of Tokyo, Missy Higgins, and Vera Blue, as well as working on Junior MasterChef, The Voice Australia, and the 2021 AFL Grand Final.

Buc is sought as a conductor for live film concerts, having conducted the world premieres of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Lion King (2019), Beauty and the Beast (2017), Shrek 2, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. He is also the only person in the world to have conducted all three original Star Wars films in concert in a single day.

A native of London, John Powell was an accomplished violinist as a child, wrote music for commercials out of school, and assisted composer Patrick Doyle in the early 1990s. He moved to the United States in 1997, where he worked on numerous projects for Hans Zimmer and his film music company Remote Control. He cowrote the score for Antz with Harry Gregson-Williams and quickly became one of the most desirable and versatile of film composers.

Powell was catapulted into the realm of A-list composers by displaying an entirely original voice with his oft-referenced scores to the first installment of Matt Damon’s Bourne trilogy, The Bourne Identity, from 2002. He has become the go-to writer for family animated films, scoring such hits as Shrek (cowritten with Harry Gregson-Williams), Chicken Run (cowritten with Harry Gregson-Williams), Ice Age: The Meltdown, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Bolt, Rio, Happy Feet, Happy Feet Two, and the two first installments of Kung Fu Panda (cowritten with Hans Zimmer). His pulsating action music has provided the fuel for Hancock, Green Zone, Stop Loss, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and The Italian Job. His music has also sweetened the romance of Two Weeks Notice and P.S.: I Love You. In 2006, his music empowered X-Men: The Last Stand, lent tenderness to I Am Sam, and gripping, real-time drama to United 93. 

His infectious score for How to Train Your Dragon earned him his first Academy Award nomination. Powell has also lent his voice to the score of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, Ice Age: Continental Drift, Rio 2, and How To Train Your Dragon 2. His work can be found in Warner Bros.’ Pan starring Hugh Jackman, Universal Pictures’ action thriller Jason Bourne starring Matt Damon, Fox’s Oscar-nominated animated feature Ferdinand, and Disney’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, directed by Ron Howard, which gave him the opportunity to collaborate with John Williams. Other recent credits include the final installment of How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, directed by Dean DeBlois, and this year's live-action adaptation of How to Train Your Dragon. 

In addition to his numerous film scores of all genres, Powell has also written concert works for choir and orchestra. A selection of these has been released in June of last year with the album Hubris: Choral Works by John Powell—including his deeply moving work A Prussian Requiem.