Will JonesThe London composer landed in Los Angeles less than a year ago. She now preps orchestral sessions in Santa Monica by day and writes ambient fantasy scores that have pulled nearly two million views online.
An hour before a scoring session, a studio is mostly paper. Parts stacked by stand, click tracks verified, printed scores checked one bar at a time, the room quiet in a way it will not be again until everyone goes home. This is the part of film music that never makes the featurette. It is also where Caitlin Perry spends a good share of her working week.
Perry is a composer and pianist from London who arrived in Los Angeles in late 2025. Since June she has worked as a studio technical assistant at Arata Music Inc., the Santa Monica company built around composer Steve Jablonsky, where she prepares session materials, extracts parts, handles score checking and keeps assets moving across Pro Tools and Cubase on projects for Paramount and Netflix. Ask her and she will tell you she is early in her career. Her credit list argues otherwise.
A South London start, with Irish folk underneath
Perry grew up in South London, in reach of a jazz and contemporary classical scene that rewarded curiosity, and in a family whose Irish roots meant folk and rock were always playing somewhere in the house. Melody first, then story, then the idea that music carries where you come from. She trained on classical and jazz piano from a young age and realised early that writing music interested her at least as much as performing it.
That took her to Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance for classical piano and composition, where she completed an LTCL diploma, and then across the Atlantic to Berklee College of Music in Boston. She graduated in 2025 with a Bachelor of Music in Screen Scoring and Jazz Composition, Magna Cum Laude, on a World Tour Scholarship. For more than two years she also sat at the piano in Berklee’s Studio Film Orchestra, recording new cues for working composers including Mike Post, Trevor Gureckis and Stephanie Economou. It is unglamorous, high pressure work: sight read it, play it clean, do it again in twenty minutes.
Two skill sets, one person
Los Angeles is full of composers who write beautifully and cannot rescue a corrupted session at midnight, and full of technical assistants who can rescue anything but do not read an orchestral score for pleasure. Perry sits in the narrow overlap. She came up through orchestration and composition, then went straight into professional rooms rather than staying in academia, first at Remote Control Productions in Santa Monica and then at Arata Music.
That combination matters more now than it did twenty years ago. A modern Hollywood score moves through composition, orchestration, MIDI programming, virtual instruments, mockups, live recording and post, often on a schedule that leaves no room for translation errors between departments. Someone who understands both the musical intent and the machinery is not a convenience. She is a bottleneck removed.
Perry has said that composing can often be quite a solitary profession, and that the collaborative studio environment has been a relief as much as an education. What she keeps naming as the surprise is the craft in the logistics: the organisation, the checking, the sheer number of small correct decisions standing between a written cue and a room of musicians playing it.
Four films, nine months, one collaborator
Her own scores tell a different story, and a louder one. Over the past year Perry has built a running creative partnership with the Spanish animator Isabella Ferreiro, who works as be3el. Four animated shorts so far, each one a different problem: ambient electronics on “Pixie Hollow” and “Hidden Words,” orchestral writing on “Little Ballerina,” ambient fantasy again on this year’s “Beltane.”
The numbers are not modest. “Little Ballerina” has passed 856,000 views. “Hidden Words” sits above 447,000, “Pixie Hollow” above 319,000. Add “A Woman with Webbed Feet,” an orchestral fantasy score for director Rose Mollet, and the independent catalogue clears 1.6 million views without a studio marketing budget anywhere near it. There is also “How 2 Live Organically,” a fifteen minute hybrid score for a claymation film screened at the MFA Film Festival in Boston, and “Heirlooms,” a dark fantasy score for a Bristol stop motion short.
Enya, Eno and a prepared piano
Perry’s own sound leans atmospheric rather than triumphant. Prepared piano, orchestral writing folded into electronics, organic textures, long decays, room for silence to do work. She names Enya and Brian Eno alongside Hildur Gudnadottir, Max Richter, Aphex Twin and Danny Elfman, which is a fair map of the territory: classical bones, ambient patience, a taste for the uncanny.
The genres she gravitates toward follow from that. Horror. Dark fantasy. Magical realism. Animation. Psychological storytelling. Anything where texture carries more weight than theme, and where the relationship between silence and orchestration is the actual instrument.
The album, and what comes after
She is currently writing her first album, a chance to work out what her voice sounds like without a picture to serve. Beyond that the ambition is straightforward and unhedged: feature films, television, animation, projects where a composer is trusted to set the emotional temperature rather than match it.
She has also put time into the rooms that make that possible for other people, through the Women in Film Initiative at Berklee and, since moving west, the Alliance for Women Film Composers. Film music remains a field where the assistant chairs and the composer chairs are filled by very different demographics, and Perry is quietly occupying both.
Los Angeles collects talented arrivals every week. Fewer of them show up already able to build the session, read the score and write the cue. Watch the credits.