Meet Ruiqi Zhao

We were lucky to catch up with Ruiqi Zhao recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Ruiqi, so excited to have you with us today, particularly to get your insight on a topic that comes up constantly in the community – overcoming creativity blocks. Any thoughts you can share with us?
As a film composer, we can spent almost a day, sitting in front of the laptop trying to come up with a great musical theme or figure out how to develop a musical idea. Creativity blocks indeed bothers me sometimes. But now that I think about it, I am just afraid of not being perfect enough. There is always a voice in my mind that tells me I have to compose something that perfectly fits to the picture and it has to be beautiful enough to draw people’s attention the second when they hear it. So now I will just tell myself it’s okay to not be perfect. The first thing to do is just come up with something and be relaxed without quickly judging it. And then, I will do some adjustments with complete peace of mind. Eventually it turns out really good every time.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I am a film composer and a singer-songwriter. I gained my master degree at Eastman School of Music, majoring in Contemporary Media and Film Composition in 2021. As people would know, our program at Eastman was created and sponsored by Five-time Emmy award winning composer Jeff Beal. I am honored to be one of his students. After graduation, I move to LA.

After I got LA, I have been working for Hollywood Composer Nathan Wang. I learned so much from him. I do additional music, orchestration, music arrangement and score production, etc. We did a lot of projects together, including the move: One True Loves, starring Hollywood actor Simu Liu, released in April 7, 2023, the Spanish movie: Mi Otro Jon which is going to be released on October 2023. and Chinese movie “Ba Jiao Long Zhong”(Never Say Never), directed by Baoqiang Wang, which hit more than 280 million box office in July, 2023. And we are now working on Jackie Chan’s new movie that is going to be on in 2024.

Making music is always exciting to me. I received a lot of kind and warm words from people who love my music. They just messaged me on Instagram, which made my day. And I always feel so lucky to be part of a story-telling project like a move, TV series and video game, etc. Helping the audience to better understand the whole story is always the most exciting part to me. On the other hand, I feel like consistent improvement on my compositional skills and other skills would make me happy too. And for this year, I got some small achievements. . I won the Gold Prize and Platinum Prize of 2023 World Melodia Championship. My piece The Elf Led Me To You got accepted for the 2024 Women Composers Festival of Hartford. Besides, I was one of the finalists of Apulia Soundtrack Awards and Semi-Finalists of FMC Film Music Contest. I also got accepted into Television academy. Still a long way to go but I will keep moving forward!

In addition, I also do library music for music licensing company like Howling Music and Artlist io. Two pieces of mine got featured in Apple Podcasts. I also write music for short films. A lot of them were selected into famous film festivals like LA Shorts Film Festival, Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival and Holly shorts Film Festival.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I would say the most important skill is your professional skill in your own industry. We should always keep that in mind. And we should also have promotion skills. We should let people know what we are doing now and what we are capable of. We should also do networking and step out of our comfort zones. Just do the right things and be patient.

Any advice for folks feeling overwhelmed?
I would say when I feel overwhelmed, I will go to some dance studios and go shopping with my fiends. It’s totally normal to feel overwhelmed. For me, I will just try to focus on other stuff.

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