Perched on a chair, his feet tucked under him, British composer Stephen Warbeck held his breath as the orchestra brought his music to life. He said he wasn't nervous.

Until this moment in a Honolulu recording studio, all of it — the strings and the horns and the percussion — had existed only in his mind. But to hear it now was half the reward Warbeck sought. The Academy Award-winning composer wanted to know if his music — and the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra's interpretation of it — matched the actions of a motion picture playing out before him on a tiny black monitor.

For Warbeck, who scores movies and TV shows, his musician's canvas was the new film "Princess Kaiulani."

There was silence before the composer commented on the first take, which featured about a minute of soaring strings set against an armed confrontation outside 'Iolani Palace.

"You need to have your violins more like a knife, more edgy," Warbeck said. "We need a more distinct change in color."

The crescendo should have "a more nightmarish quality," he told the orchestra, so all 48 musicians plus its principal conductor, Andreas Delfs, played it again.

"That take is OK," Warbeck said. "I reckon we can do better."

And they did.

It was the start of a long day of recording 20 musical segments, each one about a minute long. Amid a slew of unexpected noises, from the creak of the conductor's wooden stool while he waved his baton to someone drilling out a door jam in a nearby room, there was pressure to get it right.

"It is in many ways harder than a rehearsal," said Delfs. "In a rehearsal, you can relax and make a joke. Here, you have to be quiet and not hear a pin drop. If somebody goofs, it's ruined."

Music is a crucial element of any film, but maybe more so for this moody, 19th-century historical romance.

The film was shot on O'ahu and in Britain last spring, including inside 'Iolani Palace. It stars Q'orianka Kilcher, a dark-eyed beauty, in the role of Ka'iulani, and is the first big production for Island Film Group, the Hawai'i-based studio that is co-producing the $9 million movie with London-based Matador Pictures.

The movie focuses on Ka'iulani's short, tragic life as well as the lowest point in modern Hawaiian history. She died at age 23 after witnessing the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893 and trying unsuccessfully to restore Hawaiian self-rule.

Besides Kilcher, who captivated audiences as Pocahontas in the 2005 film "The New World," the film also stars Barry Pepper, Will Patton and Shaun Evans. Marc Forby is the director.

HAWAI'I RESOURCES

Choosing to use the Honolulu Symphony was in keeping with Island Film Group's desire to use as many Hawai'i resources as possible, but it's the first time the organization has been tapped to record a movie score.

Because movie scores are typically done with smaller orchestras, the use of a full symphony orchestra will give the film a larger, more complex sound, said producer Ric Galindez, co-owner of Island Film Group.

"Anything a symphony does is going to sound big, and that's been our goal with this movie," he said. "This movie looks really big, and it looks like an epic motion picture, and that was what we were going for."

IT'S ALL ABOUT LIGHT

The producers are hoping that Warbeck, who won an Oscar for the music he scored for the 1998 film "Shakespeare in Love," will give "Princess Kaiulani" a golden glow.

After months of working on the score for the film, Warbeck arrived in Honolulu recently to oversee the recording in the spare, new studio at the Musicians Association of Hawai'i.

It had not been difficult to persuade him to join the team.

Although Warbeck had never been to Hawai'i and knew little of its history, he immediately liked the script when he first read it 10 months ago, he explained a few days before the recordings began.

When he saw early footage that was shot in Hawai'i, Warbeck was smitten by the squishy intangible that he says composers love: The lighting.

"As you can imagine for music, the visual impact of a film is so important on the composer because that is where we get our inspiration from," Warbeck said.

When the filmmakers arrived in Norfolk, England, in May for additional scenes, the composer eagerly traveled several hours north of his British home to visit the set. Again, he found his muse.

In Norfolk, as the cameras rolled, Warbeck reveled in the "fantastic contrast" between the rural country landscape and the footage he had seen from Hawai'i.

"There is something wonderful about the light in Norfolk, but it is much less intense and watery than the light in Hawai'i," he said. "So the two halves of the film look so different."

SETTING A MOOD

Warbeck wrote 60 minutes of music for the film. It's important to the success of "Princess Kaiulani" — to the mood and pace of the movie — because the film has long passages without significant dialogue, he said.

"You can imagine if there is loads of dialogue, it is harder for the music to take off," Warbeck said. "Here, there are lots of sections where Princess Ka'iulani is looking back on her past with her mother, collecting shells on the beach, and there are wonderful opportunities for the music to express itself."

Warbeck, a father of four, lives with his family on a farm in Sussex. It's an idyllic setting to write music and Warbeck, 54, works out of a small cottage behind his house. He's composed music for more than 60 movies and TV shows.

The English composer has been involved with music since he was 5, when he began studying piano and violin. By his teens, Warbeck was into blues and rock 'n' roll and dreaming of being a pop star.

While in college in Bristol, though, he wrote music for the university's theater productions. He started his career with a job at a theater in East London in 1977 and wrote his first music for a movie in 1985.

He still performs, though, playing piano and accordion for a band called The Kippers. And when he needs a break from music, Warbeck builds what he calls "crude furniture."

"I just use hand saws," he said. "I use an electric drill, although I witnessed a friend who's a violinist drill through his finger a few months ago. It was horrible."

Warbeck would never think of creating a film score and not being around to guide the musicians playing it for the first time. It's too fulfilling to miss.

But as the Honolulu Symphony recorded each segment of Warbeck's score, something else happened, too.

He could sense it among the orchestra musicians after only an hour on the very first day.

The music wasn't just in his head.

"There on that last take, I felt like they were taking control of it and making it their own," he said. "It's starting to become something, and it's very pleasing. They are taking it out of my hands, and that's very exciting. It's a very nice feeling."