Thilo Schaller is an award-winning German-Canadian composer, sound designer and music producer who is known for his diverse musical range. Most recently, Schaller composed the score for the Italian documentary A Portrait of Redemption in Five Acts, which chronicles the story of Giampaolo Manca, the former ‘Doge’ of the Venice Mafia – Mala del Brenta. The festival-bound film features a musical palette highlighted by a very personal approach to musical storytelling to portray the various stages of Giampaolo Manca’s life.
Previously, Schaller worked as a freelance composer, music producer, and recording engineer with Dutch national classical radio station Radio4, and throughout his career, he has worked with renowned orchestras, including the Lithuanian National Philharmonic Orchestra and the Academic State Symphony Orchestra. Schaller’s very first score for a Canadian feature film was nominated for an Alberta Film and Television Award, and his extensive range of experience in short films, feature films, and international documentaries has made him a prominent figure in the sound community.
Credits of his include Gate 67’s The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw, and Ham n Egger’s Rationale and the TV Series Ominous (Bell Fibe TV1), directed by George Mihalka. Schaller is active in multiple immersive audio panels through AES and has held professor and teaching positions at the University of Lethbridge, Buffalo State University, and the Royal Conservatoire in Hague. Through IMEXsound, an immersive production studio that Schaller co-founded, he previously worked with Overlook Events on projects including Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Symphonic Adventure, Bandai Namco’s The Elden Ring Symphonic Adventure, and SYBO Games’ Subway Surfers franchise for which he recorded and mixed the orchestral versions of the theme music for the game’s ten-year anniversary. Additionally, albums that Schaller has either produced or co-produced have gone on to garner a number of awards and accolades, including the German Echo Jazz Award as well as a nomination for the Quarterly Critics’ Choice for the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik (German Record Critics’ Award) that included an original composition by Schaller.
Fascinated by the emotional power of the interplay between sound and image, Schaller looks forward to continually embedding himself in the world of composition and expanding into an array of visual and immersive storytelling mediums.
Schaller credits his success to his early training in classical piano, clarinet, and sax, ultimately graduating from the Royal Conservatoire The Hague and the Utrecht School of Arts in The Netherlands where he studied Classical Clarinet, Art of Sound, Sound Design and Composition in Contexts. He currently resides in the greater Niagara Falls and Toronto area.
