Samuel Lam was born with a large birthmark on the right side of his face and spent much of his childhood alone because of it. Growing up in Hong Kong, it was hard for him, being a loner, but when he was 12 years of age, his sister bought him a guitar and his whole life changed. Music became a way to express himself, changing his personality and giving him something to connect with others.

Now, Lam is an industry leading composer and orchestrator is his home country and abroad. He has worked on multi-million-dollar blockbusters, such as Crazy Alien, to award-winning films like Mommy’s Girl. He has scored dozens of short films, and has many exciting projects on the way, including Paramount’s Playing with Fire, starring John Cena, Judy Greer and Keegan-Michael Key, directed by Andy Fickman, and Detective Chinatown, a 12 episode web-series, produced and written by Chen Sicheng, the director of the feature film of the same name, which generated over $600 million USD at the box office.

Lam is known all over the world for his talent, and recently worked on the highly anticipated Chinese series Paratrooper Spirit. The show is about a team of paratroopers with actual combat as their training ground, as they push hard to level up their fighting abilities and complete different missions. Set in the foreground of military reform, the story follows military men like Zhang Qi and Qi Xiao Tian. To develop an air force that can compete in the global stage, a special team called Guo Gai Tou has gathered. After the initial adjustment period, Guo Gai Tou began fighting wars in the North and South and challenging greater enemies. Warriors from Guo Gai Tou who are dispatched to other teams become aces in the field.

“It is a good way to increase understanding and knowledge about the military through the influence of media and entertainment. This show has a really interesting military service theme, the paratrooper,” said Lam.

Working on a series is far different than a feature film, and Lam was eager to work on his first television show with Paratrooper Spirit and working in television in China differs greatly from America. Rather than getting each episode weekly, as the U.S. does things, Lam got every episode of the show at once. Although there is a greater time crunch with this method, Lam likes knowing how the entire story is developed to orchestrate the score accordingly. He was given all 35 episodes of the season to work on and began by watching each one. Then he and his team started developing essential thematic materials such as main theme and melodies for characters that worked with each and every episode and helped to tell the story.

“It is very challenging working on a TV Show. Because of the large amount of content, you have to be very organized, and work at a super-fast pace. I had to arrange all kinds of music genres, from action orchestra, to rock and romantic pop song, and that was really fun,” said Lam.

It takes an extremely broad skill-set to orchestrate for a television show, and Lam possesses just that. He arranged hundreds of minutes of music for Paratrooper Spirit that will continue to be played over the show’s run, with millions hearing his work, and he couldn’t be more excited.

Paratrooper Spirit is currently being promoted in China and will be released in September 2019 on a major television network in the country. Be sure to keep an eye out for it.