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

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

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