About Smith

W. F. Smith Leithart was born in Cambridge, England in 1997. At age one, he moved across the pond (and then some) to Moscow, Idaho, a small college town in the panhandle of the state. It was while living in the midst of wheat fields and mountains that Smith discovered a love for music. When he was eight years old, Smith had his first piano lesson. Immediately following the lesson, instead of practicing, he sat at the piano and made up a tune. A short time later, Smith's brother bought him a notepad of staff paper, and he began to write. At 13, he taught himself how to use GarageBand, and spent many late nights creating loops.

After moving to Birmingham, Alabama at age 16, Smith began to take music more seriously, and started studying composition under Joel Davis, a professor at Samford University. Additionally, he took piano lessons from Barbara Shinn, another Samford professor. When he graduated high school, Smith enrolled in Samford University's School of the Arts, studying piano under Kathryn Fouse and composition under Mark Lackey. He graduated from Samford Summa Cum Laude with a degree in music composition. 

Inspired to write film scores by composers such as Thomas Newman, Hans Zimmer, and John Powell, Smith has scored several short films by filmmakers Tabiyus Nah, Sheffield Leithart, Santiago Calogero, and others. In March of 2021, he won the award for Best Soundtrack at the Assurdo Film Festival for his work on the short film Unorthodox (directed by Landon Stephen Popadic). A link to the soundtrack can be found at various points on this site, but the film is not yet available to the public. Smith also composed music for planetarium shows at Samford University’s Christenberry Planetarium, and his music for those can be found on all streaming platforms under the title Zenith.

Since moving to Los Angeles in 2020, Smith has worked on a variety of films and other media. His 2022 soundtrack for the short film Diminished can be found here. Since 2021. he has been working for Diamond Mine Productions as one of their composers, writing cues for CBS Media Ventures shows (Dr. Phil, Rachael Ray, The Drew Barrymore Show, etc.). He has collaborated with many organizations to create music for their media, including Extreme Music, Loor, and ULAX. Smith has also worked in the music department for films, shows, and video games such as Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Visit this site’s watch and listen pages to find more information on Smith’s work.

Smith has also composed several pieces of concert music for instrumentations ranging from solo piano and chamber ensemble to SATB chorus and wind band, and has garnered performances and/or readings from the Amernet String Quartet, Samford's Wind Ensemble, Adam Alan Bowles, Kadisha Onalbayeva and Kathryn Fouse, as well as many of his fellow students at Samford. All the recordings from Smith’s composition recital, which took place in April of 2019, can be found at his blog page on this site.

Additionally, Smith has spent time and energy developing his alt-pop skillset, releasing music under the name Iron Effigy. Although nothing has been released under this alias since its August 2020 album The Gospel Order, he continues to write songs and slowly develop ideas for future releases.

Still, despite these ambitions for his pop alias, Smith has his eyes set on music for media. As aforementioned, he has written for films, shows, games, commercials, trailers, and many other mediums, injecting his powerfully vulnerable style into anything of which he is a part. In 2020, Smith moved to Los Angeles, where he currently resides.