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.