Site and Project Updates!

Hey everyone! It’s certainly been a whirlwind of a few months. I updated the website and added my film school student projects into the mix in addition to some other small updates and reformatting. I’m happy to report that I’ve been working on a few more animated projects for some great people this spring. LionHeart animation hit me up to create some sound design and mix their 20-minute pilot animatic. An animatic is basically the final stage of visual post-production before the final animation is made. It isn’t fluid like an animation, but it contains all of the movements, story, and plot points that the animation would have. The director hired me to professionally finish the sound to enhance the quality of the visual in order to pitch it to other producers and various festivals. I absolutely adore working on animation, so I knew I didn’t want to pass this up. The project was a blast, and I learned how to use a website called frame.io to move, review, and iterate content back and forth by using OBS to record sections of the project that were heavy on sound design or mixing nuance. That, coupled with thoughtful communication, led to a really wonderful collaboration. You can check out the trailer below. The full pilot is expected to come sometime this summer!

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UPDATE: The full 20 min animatic is up!

In other huge news, pending any drastic changes, my partner and I are planning to move up to the Seattle area later this year! My reasons for moving come largely from the fact that I simply don’t like the climate and culture in Los Angeles. While it has been invaluable to be in the heart of the film industry, the fact of the matter is that almost every single one of my projects in the past seven years have been remote, with maybe a few in-person meetings that lasted a few days. When the pandemic hit, both of us did not have enough space in our small apartment to do the things we loved to do—so, it was time for a change. We’re very excited to have more space for less cost. I’m looking forward to building my own sound studio and gym, and for the fresh air of the pacific northwest, There’s also, you know, Vancouver BC, a huge Canadian film hub, and where I went to film school; and it’s just a 2-hour drive away! I’m looking forward to what this new chapter in my life and career will bring.

With all of that said, I may not be working on any projects for a while, but keep checking back after this summer for more potential updates.

Over and out

~MJ

Well...it's been a year

A year of uncertainty for a lot of us. I think it’s also a year a lot of us said at some point, “I wish I could have done more.” I think a lot of our motivation dictates our surroundings; as a WFH freelancer, I didn’t get a lot of exposure to other professionals other than means of emailing colleagues and connecting on discord and other online forums with sound designers. I really made it a focus to share the work I did this past year and discover the captivating projects that they’re working on.

“Odd Dog” by Greyscale Animation

Earlier this year, I started working freelance for an animation company called Greyscale Animation with a really awesome team of animators and editors and have been working on their two projects: a series of shorts called Odd Dog and a longer short called Oren’s Way. The sound design is very SFX and music-focused rather than dialogue, so it’s been really fun to create a narrative almost solely through the sound!

I’m always looking for something new and fun to work on, and the awesome people over at A Sound Effect and Spectraveler came out with a sound design contest using a single library of sounds and a picture. Unfortunately, I found this contest with about an hour to spare, so I gave myself an extra challenge to do the best I could within 1 hour of time. You can check that out here!

Stay tuned

~MJ

More Updates

It’s been quite some time since I’ve been here, and I’m not going to pretend like I’m here of my own sheer willpower and proactiveness.

No, it’s because of COVID-19.

…but let’s be real. The virus shifted priorities onto what I really should be doing to propel my career forward and I’ve been able to do a few things to get my work out to a wider audience. I taught myself the streaming software OBS so I could record my Pro Tools edit timelines to picture to give a better sense of how I layout my workflow. I think it gives more transparency to what I’m doing in the DAW itself rather than people just hearing the finished product.

I also submitted a composition entry for the Westworld Spitfire Audio Scoring Composition Competition (now say that 5 times fast!) which you can check out below!

I’m going to continue to drop timeline videos and work on revamping some old personal projects to compare myself to my old work.

Stay tuned! Thanks for bearing with me.

Cheers

~MJ

The Freelancing Life

I used to be one of those people that thought of freelancers as somewhat lazy people that were able to make their own small windows of hours and fool around at most other times. After being such a freelancer for six months now, I have to say holy crap I have absolutely little to no time to do anything else. A little under half of my job is to be continually networking and looking for clients, which takes up the little remaining “free time” that I actually have. 

In order to keep up an average of 3 contractual clients, I have to constantly be talking to a myriad of different people in the audio field, and not only that, I have to figure out which specific jobs will cater to my own talents and strengths - a process of many detailed questions. It’s half a social game and half a working game of time management, interpersonal skills, and meeting strict deadlines with heavy emphasis on catering to client’s needs. It keeps me working an average of 45-50 hours a week, including working on weekends. It has also taught me that time is precious and unequivocally linear; it’s not something you can “take back” and save for later. Still, it’s quite nice to fuel my creativity into the wee hours of the morning and not have to worry about waking up at 7am sharp.

So I say to other freelancers and self-employed people out there, KEEP ON KEEPING ON! I have such a new and profound level of respect for you because now I can fully empathize.

Over and out

~MJ

Rebooted and Resynced

The site LIVES! After a hiatus from blogging for a while due to school, an internship, and a job, I have finally returned to the updating world in a rather exciting and unpredictable point in my life right now.

I graduated from Pyramind…well for the first time. I plan to return next year picking up Logic certifications and very advanced Pro Tools certifications.

(I’m the head in the very back, middle on the right)

Until then I will be throwing myself out there in the sound world, doing small projects for independent and indie developers of games and short films. In the meantime I will be doing a lot of my own personal sound projects and game implementation.

Some cool shit I learned this year:

Reversing the sound of a balloon popping is an excellent gun noise

Best way to get a juicy guttural squelching sound? Either plop your hands into some Mac n’ Cheese (using a U87 of course) or take a sledgehammer to a pumpkin and play with the guts after.

Using reversed reverb is a great way to make a normal voice sound unworldly or monstrous. Reversed reverb wouldn’t ever exist in our world, so to hear it is indicative of monsters or aliens.

Xform is a godly plugin.

Actually using sounds from field recording is incredibly satisfying. It means you get to say “I made that sound,” rather than “I processed and manipulated that sound,” not that there’s anything wrong with that either!

Accurate footsteps are harder to create in Foley than I excepted. Running sounds on concrete? Don’t actually run, STOMP on that concrete as hard as you can!

Clip gain is both very dangerous and very enticing in Pro Tools, use with caution.

The pencil tool zoomed in up really close actually changes the shape of the waveform in Pro Tools, and is a lifesaver for clips, blips, and pops within sounds. I treat it as a video game, finding something irregular or wrong in the audio, pinpointing it, and DESTWOYING the incorrect transient by smoothing it over.

Stay tuned for more frequent updates! I’m going to try and go for a monthly basis at this point.

Happy New Year! See you 2013, you were awesome. May 2014 be ever open to new discovery.

~MJ

The Future is Now

School was a huge bust.  Therefore I decided to graduate.

I went back to Northwestern University with the impression that I would finish my writings and papers, wrap things up, and take some really compelling classes.  What I came back to was none of these things; the classes I wanted to take: Mixology, Sound Design for Media, ASL lessons, and Post Production Audio, were not offered this quarter.  Over the course of the first week I had these constant feelings of “I do not belong here” and “I’m really unhappy,” so I did the only thing that seemed viable to me: waved two distro classes required to graduate and be done.

…and I’ve never been happier.  I have my future all planned out for the year.  In January I’m going a sound design school called Pyramind Studios located in San Francisco.  I had a tour there just yesterday and I was pretty sold upon walking in the place…it was absolutely stunning, quite literally a sound dev’s dream:

Not only will I get the real learning skill sets of multiple DAW systems, I will learn how to mix/master and record all of my projects, compose and create new music across multiple genres, and learn interactive media sound implementation (THAT’S VIDEO GAMES, PEOPLE!).  I’m really really excited, finding something you are passionate about and investing on it is probably the single greatest thing ever.

It’s simple advice, but ohhhh lordy does it go far.  More projects will be posted upon creation, updates to follow.

Typing this with a huge smile on my face,
~MJ

Dialbo III Musicology + Summer Updates

Summer Updates, now with added Diablo III Musicology

Greetings all! It certainly has been a while since I’ve posted anything. I’ve been working on a number of things this summer: finishing my paper on the sound design of the game Diablo III by Blizzard Entertainment, working on my comic script, and in general, just relaxing and building some networking.

Speaking of networking, I was lucky enough to have informational interviews at BOTH Pixar and Skywalker Sound, two very acclaimed media companies. As it turns out, Skywalker does most if not all of Pixar’s post-production and professional sound. The Pixar sound team actually only does rough foley and sound implementation and Skywalker does the rest. Really interesting stuff and I hope to keep in touch with the awesome folks over there!

I’ll end this update with a paragraph from my paper. If any Diablo III geeks read this, it’s about the uniqueness of the Whimsyshire music. Enjoy!

(The Blizzard sound team has gone to great lengths to incorporate subtle and effective atmospheric sound. One distinct melody is the haunting music to the secret “Whimsyshire” level. The piece is actually based upon the famous second movement from Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, called Le Gibet. The original: 

is a haunting melody depicting a gibbet, or a scaffold of public execution, of a hanged man against a setting red sun. The sound of a bell tolls from inside the walls of a far-off city, creating the deathly atmosphere that surrounds the observer. Throughout the entire piece is a B-flat octave ostinato, imitative of a tolling bell. The tolling of the bell remains the only anchor to an otherwise profound and desolate piece. The sound developers created a synthesized version of the score and manipulated it; the piece is both reversed and sped up, adding in jarring and bit-like sound effects to some of the backwards melody: 

This, in turn with the strange and ironic visuals of ponies and rainbows, creates an eerie atmosphere that is quite unnerving to the player.

The new version of the piece is an excellent example of atmospheric terror in audio because it strays away from the “laws of acoustic reality.” When a familiar and perhaps natural sound is created synthetically and reworked, it becomes unnatural to the listener. The human ear is accustomed to a plethora of natural sounds, including the timbre of a piano. When that timbre shifts to that of a dense and dark synthesizer sound, our perception instantly changes. The reversal of the new synthesized piece also includes a reversal in audio attack and decay envelopes, further creating a jarring effect our ears are not used to hearing.)

Until we meet again, and that should be soon considering school starts in a month!

~MJ

The Great Unknown

I sit here in bed in a hotel in New York city, probably one of my favorite places of all time, during spring break; I would easily regard myself as a city boy. I sit here and think about the possibilities of where my life will take me in the next year.

I literally do not have a clue where I’ll be in a year from now, but I do know I will sure as hell update when that time comes.

Next quarter is going to be an awesome one: microecon and a class solely devoted to writing my thesis coupled with the traditional music obligations. So far the unofficial title is called “Perceiving diegetic and non-diegetic sounds in interactive media,” Where ‘interactive media’ is just another smart word for video games. I want to study what people listen to while playing their games of choice, and how that affects their style of play or performance. The subject itself is pretty out there, and is honestly one of the reasons why I chose to write about it.

I loathed staying within the norm anyways, it’s just the type of person I am I suppose.

I worked pretty damn hard this past quarter, and will pride myself on that. My recital is done, and went successfully despite the consistent fears of doubt towards myself. I pitched the idea of acoustical engineering to the engineering school, and I know for a fact that they will take the idea with a grain of salt. I’ve recently begun a new endevour to save the 1 staff’d, 3 class’d music tech program here. The dean is somehow very anti music tech, or at least she doesn’t regard it as a main priority (focusing more on contemporary music and expanding that program rather than technology). It saddens me greatly that in this age of technology the school tries to refute it rather than embrace it. Therefore I will fight, as always, against the insurmountable odds of administration for something I believe in.

I’ve always been a fighter; I’ve always been the underdog, that part of me will never ever change.

On the recreational side, I made the script for a comic based on the ideas of Kierkegaard’s theories of existentialism that is pretty cool…and for sure I will post it once I’ve pitched it to Dark Horse comics. Please excuse the delay: I’m somewhat paranoid of IP theft in this day and age. I really need to update my sound and writing portfolios and make a real domain name for this site. I believe everything should lock nicely into place this summer provided I have the time.

Speaking of summer and of the future: what the hell. I have no clue if I got into any of the internships I applied for; I have no idea whether I’ll be staying in Evanston or Palo Alto, Irvine or Chicago, Stanford or New York. Everything is fickle at this moment in time, and teeters on the edge of a knife (sorry for the cliche metaphor, I can’t help myself sometimes). I provided at least some self-resolve with three potential options for my future:

1) Grad School
2) Internship/Job, or a combination of the two (or multiple)
3) Become a ski bum

Option 3 is looking very desirable right now, I will say that.

More to come as it develops,
~MJ

Temporary Hiatus

I meant to post something at the beginning of break but finals caught up with me.  I will be back after new years with a slew of updates; I have a lot on my mind.

With that said I’ll leave on a very old but amazing 12 days of Christmas Starcraft (2) style

~MJ