Selected Works

A Bite of Forever is an upcoming film directed by Keita Procopencko. Further details to be confirmed.

Hit the Wall is a documentary that highlights the sport of handball in Ireland, once played in alleys across every town and village in the country and now kept alive by fewer than 10,000 players. Filmed over two years by director Ailill Martin, the film follows elite competitors including Caitríona Casey, Paul Brady, Conor McElduff, and Diarmuid Nash, with Ollie Cassidy guiding the story as narrator through a gruelling competitive season that captures the raw intensity and quiet obsession behind the game.

The documentary premiered at the Cork International Film Festival in 2024, where it was nominated for Best Documentary Short, before broadcasting on TG4 in January 2025. It was self-produced by Ailill Martin and subsequently acquired by TG4.

Reunion is a short film that examines what happens when people come back together after time apart — and discover that proximity alone doesn’t close the gap. The film sits in the tension between expectation and reality, between what was imagined and what remains.

Colm scored the film with a palette of solo strings and sparse piano, letting the silences between notes carry as much meaning as the phrases themselves. The music avoids sentimentality, instead creating a quiet undercurrent that mirrors the characters’ unspoken distances — warm enough to suggest connection, held back enough to acknowledge what’s been lost.

Elysian Siege is a game score built around the collision of the sacred and the violent. The project demanded music that could hold both the grandeur of a world worth defending and the relentless pressure of its destruction — orchestral weight layered against electronic pulse, with moments of stillness cutting through the chaos.

Colm composed the score with a focus on dynamic range: from sparse, reverberant textures in the quieter exploration passages to dense, driving orchestral and hybrid cues during combat sequences. The “Chapel” theme anchors the emotional core — a solo string melody that returns throughout, each time altered by the state of the world around it.

The Good Farmer and the Failed Son is a documentary that turns inward on one of Ireland’s most deeply rooted institutions — the family farm — and the weight of inheriting a life you didn’t choose. The film explores what it means to be the son who was supposed to carry it forward, and the quiet fractures that form when expectation and identity don’t align.

Colm built the score around acoustic textures rooted in the Irish landscape — fingerpicked guitar, low strings, and open, breathing arrangements that reflect the wide skies and enclosed pressures of rural life. The music moves between warmth and unease, holding space for both the love embedded in tradition and the cost of living inside someone else’s vision of who you should be.

Samhain is a horror short steeped in ritual tension and slow-building dread, directed by Domhnall Cotter with sound design by Ben Lipson.

The film screened at Galway Film Fleadh and went on to win multiple awards on the festival circuit.

Glasshouse Heart is an animated short exploring the tension between self-protection and intimacy. The film follows a character whose heart is literally made of glass — beautiful but fragile, kept safe inside a carefully constructed greenhouse.

The score pairs celesta and harp with warm pad textures, reflecting the translucent beauty of the animation’s hand-drawn style. As the narrative moves toward its emotional turning point, the music shifts from delicate isolation into something fuller and more exposed — strings rising unguarded, mirroring the protagonist’s choice to risk connection.

Panic INC is an animated short set inside a corporate office where everything that can go wrong does — at escalating speed. The film’s comedy relies on precise musical timing, with every pratfall, mishap, and moment of dawning horror underscored by a score that knows exactly when to push and when to pull back.

Colm built the soundtrack around punchy woodwind staccatos, muted brass hits, and a ticking percussion bed that accelerates with the mounting chaos. The music walks a tightrope between slapstick energy and genuine tension, giving the comedy its edge.

Chug a Beer, Hit a Deer is a darkly comic animated short that leans into absurdist humour and backwoods Americana. The film follows a hapless character whose evening takes a series of increasingly unfortunate turns.

The score leans into twangy slide guitar, detuned banjo, and stomping percussion — all slightly off-kilter to match the film’s tone of cheerful catastrophe. Colm balanced the comedic energy with moments of genuine pathos, letting the music hint at the humanity beneath the chaos.

Cursed Dogs is an animated short steeped in folklore and the supernatural, following a pack of dogs afflicted by an ancient curse. The film’s visual style is stark and expressive, demanding a score that could match its atmosphere of creeping unease.

Colm wove together bowed dulcimer, processed whistle recordings, and low string drones to create a sound world rooted in folk tradition but warped into something unsettling. The result is music that feels both ancient and otherworldly — familiar enough to pull the viewer in, strange enough to keep them on edge.

Stalker is a short thriller that screened on TG4, following a young woman who realises she is being watched. The film demanded a score that could amplify paranoia without tipping into melodrama — a constant undercurrent of dread, felt more than heard.

Colm built the soundscape around prepared piano, processed string harmonics, and subtle low-frequency drones that seem to arrive from nowhere and never quite resolve. The music rarely plays the scene directly; instead it works obliquely, creating a sense of spatial unease that stays with the viewer even in moments of apparent calm.

The challenge was calibrating restraint: knowing when silence was more terrifying than any chord. This score represents Colm’s interest in music as psychological architecture — not illustration, but atmosphere.

Star Quest! is a 15-minute narrative short film that moves between the real and the imagined. Conor, an aging star of a TV space opera, is hospitalised and nearing death. As his body fails, he retreats into the world of the show that defined him — until a chance encounter with Sean, a terminally ill boy, pulls him back and reframes what heroism actually means.

Director Domhnall Cotter built the film across two registers — the grounded weight of the hospital and the heightened, almost mythic texture of Conor’s fantasy — and the score needed to live in both. Colm wrote music that could slip between warmth and grandeur without breaking the spell: intimate, restrained passages grounding the real-world scenes, opening into something larger and more cinematic as the fiction takes hold, but always returning to the emotional truth at the centre.

The film has screened at eleven international festivals including Fastnet, Kino London, Dam Short Film Festival, and the Silk Road International Film Festival, and marks a collaboration between emerging Irish filmmakers working across drama, fantasy, and science fiction.

Furever After is an animated short that explores the enduring connection between a person and the animal they loved. The film moves between memory and the present, tracing the quiet grief and unexpected warmth that follows loss.

The score is built around solo piano and gentle string textures, designed to feel intimate and unhurried. Colm kept the instrumentation spare, letting the animation’s visual storytelling lead while the music holds the emotional space beneath — present enough to deepen each moment, restrained enough to let the audience bring their own feeling to it.