Bear McCreary

Bear McCreary (born 17 February 1979) is an American composer and musician living in Los Angeles, California. He is best known for his work on the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica television series and for the TV series  The Walking Dead.

Biography
McCreary was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and spent most of his formative years in Bellingham, Washington. He is the son of author Laura Kalpakian and professor Jay McCreary of University of Hawaii. He is of Irish and Armenian descent. He studied under the renowned film score composer Elmer Bernstein at the USC Thornton School of Music, during which time he reconstructed and re-orchestrated Bernstein's 1963 score for Kings of the Sun. Their collaboration allowed for the complete score to be available as a soundtrack album for the first time in forty years.

McCreary earned degrees in Composition and Recording Arts from the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music, and is a classically trained pianist and self-taught accordionist.

McCreary is married to singer/songwriter Raya Yarbrough, with whom he worked on the music of Battlestar Galactica.

Battlestar Galactica and Caprica
In 2003, McCreary worked under primary composer Richard Gibbs on the 3-hour miniseries which served as a pilot for the re-imagined series of Battlestar Galactica. When the show was picked up, Gibbs opted not to devote full time to the regular series' production, and McCreary became the sole composer. He worked on the series until it reached its conclusion in 2009, scoring over 70 episodes. To date, six Battlestar Galactica soundtrack albums have been released, and have garnered a great deal of critical acclaim and commercial success. The soundtracks for season two and three ranked amongst Amazon.com's Top 30 Music Sales on their first days of release.

McCreary composed for Caprica, a prequel series set in the fictional Battlestar Galactica universe. On February 18, 2012, Bear announced that he will compose the score to the 2-hour pilot movie Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome.

Human Target
Bear provided the score for the series Human Target (based on the comic book of the same name). The pilot episode and main theme score had been recorded with a full orchestra. The series has the distinction of being one of the few with largest orchestras on television.

The score to the finale of season 1, "Christopher Chance", utilized the largest orchestra ever assembled for episodic television, and he took the opportunity to re-record the main title theme with a new orchestration with this larger ensemble.

In July 2010, he received his first Emmy nomination for the Human Target theme.

In a post on his blog on July 25, 2010, Bear announced the new creative leadership brought in for season 2 had not asked him to return for it, and he would be leaving the series.

The Walking Dead and The Cape
During Comic-Con 2010, Bear McCreary attended panels for AMC's The Walking Dead and NBC's The Cape to announce he would be composing the score for both television series.

Feature Films
Bear McCreary made his theatrical feature film scoring debut with Step Up 3D. He has also composed the scores for several direct-to-DVD features, including Rest Stop, Rest Stop: Don't Look Back and Wrong Turn 2: Dead End.

Bear is currently working on The Knights of Badassdom, his second movie with director Joe Lynch (of Wrong Turn 2) and third time for actress Summer Glau.

Video games
McCreary made an 8-bit rendition of the Dark Void theme, which was, originally, an April Fools joke. However, the theme was used for the 8-bit prequel, Dark Void Zero. He composed all the songs in an 8-bit fashion by connecting the wires on an actual NES console and cartridge to create authenticity.

He arranged James Rolfe's Angry Video Game Nerd 2010 Christmas video for the You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch song parody, with orchestra and 8-bit audio elements.