Here’s a glimpse of the hero of Sky1 HD’s epic fantasy drama Sinbad, Elliot Knight.

The 20-year-old newcomer will be starring in the iconic role of the reckless, charming and cursed sailor, but the 8th century myth is being given a distinctly 21st century makeover.

Appearing alongside Knight will be a host of well-known faces, including Lost’s Naveen Andrews, who plays Sinbad’s nemesis Lord Akbari, Sophie Okonedo as Razia, Queen of the Water-Thieves and Timothy Spall as Anicetus, The Old Man of the Sea.

Sinbad has just finished filming in Malta for transmission in 2012. Christian has just completed scoring the first six x 1 hour episodes.

The 12-part series follows Sinbad’s sea-bound journey after he is forced to flee from his home town of Basra, under a curse. On board The Providence an intriguing band of travellers is thrown together, including taciturn Norwegian sailor Gunnar (Elliot Cowan – Marchlands), the lithe and agile jewel-thief Rina (Marama Corlett – The Devil’s Double), and haughty and aristocratic Nala (Estella Daniels – Thorne). Completing the ship’s complement is the Cook (Junix Inocian – The 51st State), an odd-ball and eccentric character and the ship’s cerebral doctor Anwar (Dimitri Leonidas – Grange Hill).

Surviving a violent and magical storm, both Sinbad and his fellow ship-mates are forced to band together to face their inner demons, hopes, loves and fears. Our flawed hero embarks on an epic and emotional quest to rid himself of the curse and embrace his destiny. When mystical meets muscle anything can happen….

Christian has been working on the score for this for some 5 months now and says it is an extraordinary challenge not only as a composer but as an HOD to wrangle such a huge body of work into shape especially when handed such an extraordinary brief. “It’s a traditional family epic and thematic score full of large orchestral set-pieces but also featuring very modern elements that wouldn’t be out of place on a Tony Scott film (Christian provided a lot of material for Scott’s 2001 film “Spy Game” with composer Harry Gregson-Williams). The central characters are played in a very modern and realistic style, they’re a bunch of hustlers, so we thought we’d pepper the score with modern elements. This is pure family entertainment so the producers and I agreed that it should never be a music history or geography lesson, so we’ve thrown a lot of the established approaches to this kind of material out of the window!”.

Sinbad is an Impossible Pictures production for Sky and BBC Worldwide, produced with the assistance of Nine Network Australia.

Zam Salim’s Up There, about a young man stuck into a dead-end job welcoming the newly deceased into the afterlife, received the Paranavision Spirit Award for Independent Cinema at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, which concluded Sunday. The prize includes a Panavision camera package worth $60,000.

The film features a colourful score where “muzak” not angels permeate the airwaves on the “other-side”. Look out also for break-through performances by Burn Gorman and Kulvinder Ghir, in this unexpectedly warm take on the buddy-movie.

Christian’s score for Devil’s Double has been nominated as one of the top film scores of 2011 in Film Music Magazine, along side the likes of John Williams, Alexandre Desplat, Cliff Martinez, Thomas Newman and Patrick Doyle.

It was accompanied by these kind words:

“African and Middle Eastern movie music was hardly rocking in that trip-hop sort of way before Hans Zimmer turned a catastrophic Mogadishu military failure into a jam session with “Black Hawk Down,” setting the same furious ethnic beat for just about every similarly-themed score that followed. But leave it to Christian Henson to give it a new, darkly invigorating spin for “The Devil’s Double” as he takes desert rhythms out for a sex and drug dance in the westernized hell club of Uday Hussein. It’s a vibe at once fearsome and invigorating, tantalizing Uday’s hapless look-a-like with the sinister, sensual grooves of a dictator’s sociopathic son. Yet the serpentine sounds of Arabic winds and drums are always there with the percussive force of conscience, reminding the film’s hero of the cost of a despicable good life in the midst of his country’s agony. Henson’s mesmerizing mix of trance grooves, harsh beats and ironic strings capture this moral quandary in the heart of darkness to powerful, captivating effect for one of history’s most unusual hostages.”

To see the full article go HERE.

Having provided Jon Wright (director) with a couple of impossible bespoke source commissions for his debut  horror “Tormented” (namely the source track “My Mum Raped Me And I Liked It”) Christian was honoured and delighted to be commissioned for Jon’s second outing “Grabbers” in which the population of a small island off the coast of Ireland discover that the only way to survive after the invasion of bloodsucking aliens is to get drunk. Christian cites this show as a dream commission and brief. “This is no horror, nor thriller, but a monster movie and makes you feel like you did when I first went to the movies in 1976 and tried to cop a feel off a date in 1986″ CH’s challenge is to recreate the great scores of Goldsmith, Williams, Herrmann, and Elfman but with a 21st century and dare we say it “Hensony” feel.

Christian is pleased to announce a rare appearance as composer for an exciting new TV comedy series “Fresh Meat”. Having read scripts to the first 3 episodes Christian was desperate to be involved having not taken such a commission since the astronomical UK cult success that accompanied “Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps” and his instantly memorable “…and a pack of flakies” [sic] theme tune.

TRIVIA NOTE:  On the original demo version of Two Pints of Lager… Christian sings the theme in a drunken cockney accent. Program makers mixed up the master (Resung in a Runcorn accent by Steve Lee) and original demo versions of the titles track for series 2, which was aired and released to DVD with Christian’s rather ropey vocal rendition.