About Sean

Sean James Boyer is a Toronto-based composer who brings his love of music and storytelling into all of his projects. He is known for his exciting, imaginative, and adventurous approach to scoring, which he has brought to many projects including the Netflix animated series My Little Pony: Make Your Mark, as well as Amelia Parker (Superchannel), Mutant Weather (Cottage Life), Dog Tales Rescue (CTV), Etalk (CTV) , Daily Planet (Discovery), Newborn Moms (CBC), Haunted Case Files (T&E), Alone (History), Expedition Unknown (Discovery), 60 Days In Narcoland (A&E), Last Stop Garage (Discovery), Brojects: Built For The Weekend (Cottage Life Network) and countless other film and television programs airing internationally.

For his recent work in the Netflix 3D animated series My Little Pony: Make Your Mark, Sean created a sophisticated action adventure score using a mixture of orchestra and synthesized instruments to bring the magic, comedy and excitement back to Equestria. The score draws on bells, lush strings, and leaping woodwinds to create a fun action-packed adventure for new generations of young children that is also enjoyable for parents who grew up watching earlier iterations of the series.
 
Although he works mainly in children’s animated series, Sean’s earlier work includes many different genres. In the true crime series An Unexpected Killer (T&E/Oxygen), Sean created a haunting and unsettling soundscape, using  bell and guitar sounds that he recorded and manipulated himself, along with custom modular synths and full orchestra, to lead the audience through the twisting and unpredictable plot turns of each episode.  For the series Martyrs: The Chronicles of Blood, Sean collaborated with the show’s creator to record a vocalist singing in an invented language, which he blended with Middle Eastern instruments to tell the epic tale of the world’s first vampire. For the television series Paranormal Survivor (T&E), Sean created an atmosphere of fear and unsettledness that drove the story forward by mixing the recorded sound of a Cessna airplane propeller with a rumbling and pulsing modular synth. In the film Age of Dinosaurs (SyFy), Sean’s orchestral fanfare took the audience on a magical journey of fantasy and danger.  A proponent of the power of live musicians, Sean works regularly with orchestras in Toronto, New York and Macedonia.

Sean’s passion for music was kindled early: as a kid his favourite activity was to dress up as Superman or Indiana Jones and fly around the house singing the melodies from the iconic scores. As he got older, Sean’s brother took guitar lessons and passed on what he was taught to Sean as soon as he came home. The two brothers loved to spend their weekends jamming together and writing songs, which led to Sean playing guitar in rock bands as a teenager.

After studying jazz guitar and music theory in college, Sean interned at an ad agency and, seizing the chance to use his passion for music to help tell stories, quickly found himself working on jingles and taking part in production of radio and TV commercials.  This led to Sean creating his own music production company and scoring his first films, documentaries, and TV shows. He then collaborated with composer Todd Hayen - who became his scoring and orchestration mentor - on film projects for the National Parks Service.  Sean was also selected for the Film Scoring Workshop at New York University in 2014 where his music was critiqued by composers Mark Snow (The X-Files, Smallville), Sean Callery (24, Elementary, Homeland) and Ira Newborn (Ace Ventura, The Naked Gun) and recorded by members of the New York Philharmonic.