As a child, he played the violin and viola. Hie studied the violin at the Trinity College of Music, central London (now the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in Greenwich, London). There, he met John Ashton Thomas, who orchestrated many of Powell's scores. Powell played for "Faboulistics", an amateur rock and roll band.[2]
After finishing college, he composed music for commercials, which led to a job as an assistant to the composer Patrick Doyle on several film productions, including Much Ado About Nothing.[3] In 1995, Powell co-founded the London-based commercial music house Independently Thinking Music with Gavin Greenaway,[4] which produced scores for more than 100 British and French commercials and independent films.
Career
Powell's first score was for the Season 4 of the TV series Stay Lucky. He moved to Los Angeles in 1997 and scored his first major film, Face/Off. It was followed by Antz in 1998, the first film produced by DreamWorks Animation, which he co-scored with fellow British composer Harry Gregson-Williams, which also marked the duo's first score for an animated film. Two years later, Powell collaborated with composer Hans Zimmer on the score for The Road to El Dorado. Later that same year, he also teamed up with Harry Gregson-Williams again to compose the score to Chicken Run and then again the following year on Shrek. Gregson-Williams composed all the subsequentShrekfilms and the sequel to Chicken Run himself. In 2001 he also scored Evolution, I Am Sam, Just Visiting and Rat Race.
Powell collaborated with Liman again to score Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005). That year he also scored Robots for Blue Sky Studios, and went on to score many of the studio's subsequent films until 2017's Ferdinand.
In 2013, Powell took a sabbatical year from film scoring. In April 2014, after completing his scores to sequels Rio 2 and How to Train Your Dragon 2, he announced he would take another break to compose concert music, including a 45-minute oratorio to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of World War I. The piece, "A Prussian Requiem", with a libretto by Michael Petry, premiered on 6 March 2016 at The Royal Festival Hall, London with José Serebrier conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra.[5]
