When Zach Gindi-Chiafullo composes music for film, his approach is to translate the feelings a scene inspires in him into a score that will add to the viewing experience for others. Now a first-year music student in the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, part of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, Gindi-Chiafullo recently scored a scene for the television documentary “Unleashing Hope: The Power of Service Dogs for Children With Autism.”
The 40-minute documentary premiered April 22 on Hulu, where it is currently streaming. Gindi-Chiafullo scored a four-minute scene showing inmates training service dogs as part of a prison training program of Guide Dogs for America.
“The prisoners in the scene I composed are in a rehabilitation program that allows them to train and work with service dogs,” Gindi-Chiafullo said. “While developing a bond with the animal, they exercise qualities like love and compassion. I composed something a little sad, but also hopeful at the same time, on a MIDI keyboard.”
The composer himself, a Corcoran Scholar, is no stranger to the powerful blessings that dogs can bring to the humans who care for them, having grown up with a dog who helped him cope with his own disability. (He has been diagnosed with ADHD.) That experience gave him extra insight into the documentary’s subject.
“We got our dog during the pandemic,” he said, “and she helped me, in a way, to grow up. I was struggling a lot in school when everything was online, just failing to focus, but I developed a special bond with my dog, and that was transformational. That bond helped me get better at social skills and communication. I’m way more outgoing and way more communicative now than I was.”
But he has always been interested in the expressive possibilities of music. There were songs and compositions that fascinated him, and he determined to find out why and how those pieces of music worked.
“I grew up watching a lot of the classic Disney films,” he said, “and loving the iconic scores from John Williams, especially ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Jurassic Park.’ But my favorite was the music of ‘Inside Out’—a film of emotions.”
Music was and is a comfort to him, he said. His work on “Unleashing Hope” is his second attempt at film scoring. As a high school senior, he scored a short film depicting his classmates having fun in Central Park. Watching it made him feel a combination of happiness and nostalgia, a feeling he tried to encapsulate in the music he composed for the film.
After one of the producers of “Unleashing Hope,” Terence Noonan, who happens to be a friend of Gindi-Chiafullo’s dad, facilitated a meeting with the film’s co-directors, Michiel Thomas and Zeberiah Newman, Gindi-Chiafullo was asked to submit music for a scene that was ultimately cut from the film. He was then offered the chance to score the prison sequence.
Early in April, Gindi-Chiafullo was invited to New York to be the subject of a short segment for ABC News. He took a train to New York early in the morning and was back in D.C. for a class that evening. The clip has aired on stations across the country.
Ten years from now, Gindi-Chiafullo hopes to have more experience scoring for films. He has a childhood friend who is interested in film production, and they have talked about teaming up. He dreams of collaborating some day with heroes such as Steven Spielberg or Lin-Manuel Miranda. But in the immediate future, he’ll be working at a musical summer theater camp in Virginia, where he is excited about “the opportunity to help kids ignite their creative spark.” By showing his creativity to others, he said, he hopes to inspire them to unleash theirs.
The Corcoran Scholars awards, renewable for up to 10 semesters, are scholarships given to incoming students who plan to major or minor in music. Recipients are offered priority residential placement in the Arts + Design Living Learning Community (LLC).
Though Gindi-Chiafullo is pursuing a B.A. in Music, his favorite class so far was a first-year writing course, Writing Through the Self, focused on using his own experience and identity to enhance his writing. One of his projects in the course involved the process of being selected to score a scene in “Unleashing Hope.”
“I’m honestly so happy I ended up here at GW,” he said. (He looked at various schools, all south of his home in New York because he prefers warm weather.) “It turned out to be the right place for me.”
