About

Ashton Gleckman is a composer and filmmaker from Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. He is founder of the production company, Blackbird Pictures, host of the Behind the Score series on YouTube, and director of the 8-part History Channel documentary series, Kennedy (available on Hulu), which the Los Angeles Times called “as exhaustive as is practical, going beyond the best-known photos and film clips to create something that feels fresh.” His music has been featured in projects like Netflix’s WW2: The Road to Victory and Avatar: The Deep Dive on Disney Plus. A life-long Hoosier, Ashton was honored by the Indianapolis Business Journal in 2024’s Twenty in Their Twenties.

An accomplished musician, Ashton began his musical career at age six. To date, he has released three documentary projects as director (We Shall Not Die Now, The Hills I Call Home, and Kennedy), 8 albums of original music, and has composed scores for a number of productions. Ashton’s albums of original music include Fragments, Discovery, Winds of Spring, and Memories. He has also released two albums of original film music arrangements titled A Night at the Movies (Volumes 1 and 2). Since 2016, Ashton has hosted the series “Behind the Score” in which he deconstructs some of history’s most iconic film scores. Each episode has featured a suite of music from the film arranged and recreated by Ashton using virtual instruments, MIDI programmed from scratch in a computer. Episodes of Behind the Score have included Interstellar, Inception, the Dark Knight, The Imitation Game, and Oppenheimer. Ashton’s arrangement of Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar score, over 13-minutes long, broke 13 million views on YouTube. For his YouTube channel, Ashton has also conducted interviews with composers like Harry Gregson Williams (The Chronicles of Narnia) Simon Franglen (Avatar: The Way of Water), Nathan Johnson (Knives Out), Mychael Danna (Life of Pi) and Justin Hurwitz (La La Land). Ashton’s work has been recognized by Academy Award-winning director Guillermo Del Toro, who shared one of Ashton’s Behind the Score video of The Shape of Water on his social media accounts, and composer Danny Elfman, who shared his Behind the Score episode for Edward Scissorhands. In Winter 2021/2022, Ashton’s rendition of Elfman’s theme, Ice Dance, reached number one on one of the most downloaded and widely used social media apps - TikTok, bringing in more than 400,000 track uses.

Before cultivating his interest in composition, Ashton had a rock n’ roll calendar that featured frequent gigs with three bands. Ashton was the lead guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter in the Rising Gravity Experience (RGE), who recorded their debut EP in Nashville at the Dark Horse Institute when Ashton was 13 years old. The band performed dozens of shows across the state of Indiana between 2012 and 2014.

At the age of 14, Ashton set his sights on the world of film scoring, orchestral composition, and music production. Ashton scored his first film at the age of 15 while he was a freshman in high school, working with Gi Orman of BiG Productions in New York City on the Holocaust documentary, Once Upon a Family. He later collaborated with Gi, writing the score for his film Hidden (2017).

In March 2019, Ashton set out to make a feature length Holocaust documentary film titled “We Shall Not Die Now,” which was his directorial debut. Ashton filmed over twenty-five interviews throughout the US and the UK — and filmed at many sites in Poland, such as the Auschwitz and Treblinka Nazi extermination camps. In addition to directing and shooting the film, Ashton also co-scored the film alongside Austrian composer, Michael Frankenberger, one of Ashton’s long-time friends and collaborators. The film premiered at the 28th Heartland International Film Festival on October 12th and won the audience choice award for the Indiana Spotlight category. The film was released on December 5th 2019 on Amazon Prime in the United States and United Kingdom. Using outtakes from We Shall Not Die Now, Ashton created the short film “I Am The Last Surviving Prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials,” releasing it on YouTube in November 2020. The short, which has garnered more than one million views on YouTube, tells the story of Benjamin Ferencz — the last living prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials. The short film was shown by Ukrainian ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, during a UN General Assembly in New York City in March, 2022.

Ashton’s sophomore film endeavor was The Hills I Call Home, an intimate hour-long documentary profile of a small town in the middle of Appalachia. The film was produced during the COVID-19 pandemic and released in March 2021 by film distributors, Gravitas Ventures.

In 2020, Ashton began research on what would become his third documentary project as director, an 8-part docuseries about the life of JFK. Ashton began filming the series, titled Kennedy, in March 2021, going on to film 70+ interviews in 25 states. Interviewees ranged from TV personalities like Conan O’Brien to historians, biographers, Kennedy family members, politicians, and surviving Kennedy White House insiders. The series is narrated by Emmy Award-winner Peter Coyote, known for his work with Ken Burns on films like The Roosevelts and The Vietnam War. Ashton also took on the role of editor and co-composer for the series, working with composers Michael Frankenberger (We Shall Not Die Now) and Cameron Moody, a California-based composer who worked on Jordan Peele’s acclaimed film, NOPE. The series debuted on The HISTORY© Channel in November 2023. Following his work on Kennedy, Ashton became a member of the Director’s Guild of America. Kennedy subsequently made its streaming debut in July 2024, releasing on Hulu.

Ashton is currently working on a four-part documentary, The Quiet Village, which tells the forgotten story of the first Nazi extermination camp, Kulmhof — also known as Chelmno. For The Quiet Village, Ashton began filming in Poland in May 2024. Filming will continue through the end of January 2025 in the US, Canada, Germany, and the UK.

To read more about Ashton’s filmmaking work, find the official website for Blackbird Pictures.