Soundtrack Composer
by Tirzah Tyler

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When Hans Zimmer was growing up in Germany, his mother was a musician and his father was an inventor and engineer. His father encouraged him to experiment with the family's piano. Throughout his life, Hans Zimmer has enhanced music with technology and computers. Hans Zimmer's music career began when he was a young man. He joined a band called Krakatoa, and later he played with another band called The Buggles. The Buggles' 1979 song "Video Killed the Radio Star" was the first music video that ever aired on MTV.

Combining visual entertainment and music has been a theme throughout Hans Zimmer's career. He began to produce and write film scores and soundtracks in the 1980s. A major milestone in Hans Zimmer's career was writing the score for the 1988 movie Rain Man. This earned him a nomination for an Academy Award. Since then, he wrote and co-wrote the soundtracks for a variety of other movies, including Gladiator, Pearl Harbor, Shark Tale, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, Megamind, Man of Steel, and the TV miniseries The Bible. He has won many awards for his movie scores, including an Academy Award for his score for The Lion King. Hans Zimmer has also written theme songs for video games. In addition, he helped to develop an app that allows people to add music to personal videos that they have recorded on their iPhones.