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

VFS Final Project - Anomaly 2

This was my final audio project at VFS, and utilizes all of the audio skills I learned in this past year. The audio is a complete re-design with the majority of original audio added to the sound edits. The music provided by 5 Alarm.

VO:

I recorded the voice over and the majority of the sounds for the final trailer. I used McDSP's Futzbox plugin to get the radio effect for the introduction and scavenger voices; I made a wet/dry mix with a low-passed signal of the recorded audio as the dry. For the commanders helmet reverb, I took an impulse recording of a ripped piece of air duct from the factory and used it as the dry signal with a different futz as a wet. Overall, the process was very challenging. The human voice contains many nuances on top of adding in processing from both reverbs and radio futzs. I had a lot of EQing to do in order to balance the quality of the voice with the effect I wanted in the end.

SFX:

Many of the mechanical sounds for the B-E-A-R tank were recorded in a real metal factory with a few library sounds to accent the current design. The evil dinosaur bots were designed from the squeaks of various doors opening and closing at the film school combined with bowing an old metal oil drum. The intro was especially fun to work on; I took a lot of recorded announcer dialogue from previous VFS school projects (with permission of course) and futz them in combination with sonar pings and radio tuning, distortion, and static. It made for a great opening soundscape to establish the context of the rest of the action later on. Many of the snow sliding sounds were taken from a skiing trip at Cypress mountain in northern Vancouver. The laser and gun design was all done with Komplete Synths: Massive and Reaktor 5.

The most challenging thing for me personally was perspective. With POV (point of view) changes, I had to take into account how much "air" or distance was between the camera and the point source of the sound. I took this into account when recording a lot of the mechanical sounds and ended up making three batches of recordings: close, medium, and far distances. This gave me more leeway when I added my edits.

I hope you enjoy the final redesign of this Anomaly 2 animated intro!

~MJ

Need for Speed Test Video Assignment

This was a time constrained class assignment in which we were given 24 hours, audio files, and a video from EA’s Need for Speed (Shift 2) designed to emulate a real test video package for game audio applications. We were able to edit and process the files any which way but we were not allowed to use any audio files outside the ones we were given. I did my sound design the very old fashioned way: by taking existing audio and manipulating them with time compression expansion and pitch shifting. The only plugins I used were Altiverb (Outdoor Stadium), Futzbox, Waves Doppler, EQ-7 band, Pitch Shift, and Time Shift. I pitched many sounds up and down, as well as high or low passed on an EQ to find new frequencies. I slowed specific sounds down and sped them up to increase or decrease the energy of a sound in a specific situation. Speeding up a very long sound will increase its energy or impact. I made great use of the doppler plugin for many of the car-bys and animal roars and breaths to accent many of the transitions in the piece.

Editing –

I wanted to make the first half about the race. My goal was to make it seem like the listener was at the race itself without getting too literal into that idea. I put specific announcer lines and audience cheers at the beginning before the picture started to warm up to that feeling. Instead of emulating a realistic situation of all of the car-bys, I threw in all types of variations of multiple bys throughout the entire first section. I created low LFE’s by pitching down and low passing the audience sound. The idea here was to recreate the feeling of exhilaration and excitement one gets when they play a racing game.

I built that sonic feeling until the transition scene. I added delayed pieces of the wood snap sound to the transition in addition to a classic camera shutter because it accented all of the quick cuts and chaos of the camera shots. A reversed cymbal served as a sound design rise that took us out of that chaos and into the surprised look on the drivers face.

The vision in the second half of the video was to accent the idea of the fast-paced collision action of a racing game. I added in a high-pitched sound I got from pitching up and high passing the fire sound that coincided with the announcer’s call of a crash. I then started to add pieces of collisions as the camera gradually zoomed out and added bys to fast transitions. The last transition sound I layered in a few bys with the whoosh breath and doppler’d the pig squeal to get an extremely high pitch zippy sound that worked quite well. When we hit the black screen, I originally had just the announcer speaking, however I realized that the point of this is to sell a racing game, and why would we not hear an engine with that? I wanted to lose the low end and have just the two layers play off of each other as the title came up.

Mixing –

The mixing process was pretty simple. Almost all of the car-bys were doppler’d in different ways. I thought adding doppler would be better and less jarring than just hard panning the bys. I did not pan many of the bys for that very reason – adding too much pan takes the audience away from the point and the excitement of the sonic experience. I added in futz and some EQing to the announcers voice to make the experience feel more authentic. I also added outdoor reverb to many of the bys and collisions to make it feel like we were in the space of the arena. I did not do this to every sound because I wanted there to be foreground sounds and variance in addition to the background sounds. In so doing this, the piece felt like it had more depth of field.

This was probably one of my favorite projects to do at VFS thus far. I love working a story through a limited scope of constraints when it came to the audio files we could use. After all, it's what I used to do before I attended the school!

~MJ

Film School Shorts

Hey all!

So—with film school in its 5th and almost final block (out of 6), I just got back from the film school’s premiere of the film shorts we worked on in collaboration with the film school. Part of the curriculum had us go through the entire sound pipeline for a film, from pre-production to production sound, all the way to post-production and mastering. We navigated through an intense but brief process and collaborated with the school’s film department to orchestrate 7-10 minute full shorts over the course of four months. A student in the sound department would work production on a film, then would work as an editor and then as either dialogue or SFX mixers for the same film two months later in the pipeline, working with all of the turnovers, AAFs, stems, EDL’s, and handoffs as they happened. However, while the average class was between 12-15 people, we only had 6 in our class, meaning that we had the added challenge of recording, editing, and mixing not one, but two short films instead and working as both dialogue and SFX mixers. It was an amazing experience, and I truthfully wished the entire curriculum was a lot longer—I just wanted to keep making more films!

Dr. Voodoo was the very first short I worked on. I worked production sound for both the pilot and part II and then edited both SFX and dialogue on both versions later on. This often meant a lot of hurry-up-and-wait on sets. As teams of three, we swapped roles on production sound as the boom operator, the on-set mixer, and the sound assistant. It’s amazing how much time and work has to be done to only record a short amount of footage that later gets chopped down even finer as the production pipeline continues! Needless to say, I gained an astronomical ton of respect for anyone that works in film production from that point onward. I loved working on editing the dream sequences in these especially! Check out both episodes here:

I worked next on the Brenda the Exterminator series. (and another called “The Job” that I unfortunately cannot find) I worked several audio post jobs due to the size of our class: I mixed the dialogue and music, recorded and edited the walla/looping, ADR, and foley, and was the music supervisor and music editor. The dialogue mixer is probably the most important position at the console on a sound stage. We have a saying in the sound industry that “dialogue is king” and that is definitely the truth. A sound mix for a film is separated into three parts that all have different tracks and routing: dialogue, music, and effects. On larger films, there’s usually a dialogue mixer who mixes dialogue and music and a sound effects mixer to mix sound effects, often separated into subcategories such as backgrounds, sound design, and foley. The dialogue mixer will level and attenuate all the volume set to the dialogue, meaning the dialogue will always sound the loudest and come to the forefront of the mix. The dialogue mixer also has to make sure the dialogue sounds smooth using different software plugin tools like equalization (EQ) and compression. The mixer is also responsible for making sure the dialogue sounds “in the space” of where the scene is taking place, including any ADR (automated dialogue replacement) tracks that contain dialogue that was re-recorded in a studio to replace non-desirable dialogue lines from production. For example: on Brenda, there’s a scene where she starts talking while in an enclosed area that used ADR lines, so I added some reverberation at that moment to create a sense of realism that she’s actually saying what she’s saying in that space. I also had the added fun of deciding what kind of filter I wanted to use for all of the phone calls. In the biz, we term that as “futz.”

I have to say, re-recording mixing was unlike anything I have ever done in the profession. It felt like an extremely unique, complex, and organic process, one that was constantly changing and expanding due to the nature of replaying certain parts or scenes over and over again while using automation to write and re-write volume, pan, or any other parameter for a plugin that the mixer would design. We each mixed four short films and a final project in a span of four months as part of our curriculum; I truly wanted to work another year, hell, two years, just to understand all of the nuances of re-recording mixing and the editing-> mixing pipeline process.

Check out Brenda Part II here:

…and now it’s time to dive into the final 8 week block of school and to start working on my final. I’ve got a video already lined up and I’m planning a trip to Cypress mountain planned to record myself on skis for some of the sfx. That, and a mechanical shipyard for a lot of robot and servo sounds. I won’t reveal anything more but it’s going to be a ton of work, and after 10 months of schooling, I feel like I’m more than ready for it. Stay tuned for the final video in the month to come!

10-4

~MJ

Monster Mash 2.0

Super pumped to display my newest personal sound project: Monster Mash 2.0.

I would say nearly 80% of the sounds you hear in this compilation are from field recordings in San Francisco (Walter Murch style, hoo-rah!)

The Kraken roar comes from layers of about 6 different tuba samples that I played myself in an iso booth at my old school. I added in a little bit of myself playing trombone samples as well to get some higher frequencies.

The Cloverfield monster was a fun one. All of the monster grunts you hear are actually me, though processed quite a bit. I ended up using my horrible allergies to my advantage here…though I almost got a bunch of snot on the microphone (good thing it was mine). The low oscillating frequency is also a very soft tuba sound that I processed with an LFO that changed based off of volume. 

By far my favorite Alien movie was Aliens, slightly edging out the original. The alien screech itself actually comes from an elementary school in the Castro (an SF neighborhood) in which the kids screamed really, reeealllllly loudly. I processed these screeches slowed down with the reverse sound of a baby crying. The background noise comes from Bart, which is the fast local train connecting San Francisco to the East Bay. The Bart subway, especially going over the bay bridge span, is super screechy and earsplitting. I actually had to EQ down the frequencies because it would have been way too distracting from the actual fight. The motorized sounds are from construction right outside my neighborhood. I did keep one line of Sigourney Weaver’s dialogue in there. The crunching noises are from my friends doggie grabbing a treat with gusto. CHOMP.

The last, and by far my favorite is the Monster from the Id from a super amazing old school sci-fi movie called Forbidden Planet. How does one make roars for a monster that is actually invisible? Well, every single sound this monster makes comes from a musical instrument. The core of the sound comes from a bunch of violins and cellos playing a fast tremolo that is super distorted with reverbs. The hit comes from a timpani. The lingering high pitched screech is from me using a bow on a cymbal and then crushing and elongating that sound into its frequencies. The laser sounds are from a metal slinky that I flicked at a close distance…the background lasers just have an added delay. The electricity sounds are from a processed/distorted Jacob’s Ladder that I had recorded at Burning Man using my phone.

This was a very fun project, and definitely the first time I have generated nearly all of the sounds you hear by myself without any help. This project has definitely provided me with a fun creative outlet while I wrap up my projects here in San Francisco because I have an exciting and challenging new year and a half ahead of me.

I leave you in suspense. This will continue until I make a post about my future! Soon!

~MJ

Indico Sound Design

Indico Sound Design.

My latest personal project. I re-worked the sound for a short motion graphic titled “Indico” (which roughly translates to something along the lines of exclamation/statement/indication/evidence in Latin).

I did this with the intent of clearly being in an underwater environment, with the serene ambient sometimes interrupted by what I like to call “the great unknown.” I wanted to tell a sonic story through this juxtaposing the calm with the unnerving.

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In other news, I am looking for work! I am still working freelance projects and am not currently working on anything active, so if anyone has something they want to put sounds to, please give me a shout out or email!

Cheers,

~MJ

World of Warcraft 10 Year Anniversary Logo

This is my re-take on the World of Warcraft 10 year anniversary splash logo that I had created over a year ago. I wanted to create a soundscape that would showcase many of Blizzards iconic characters from the Warcraft universe in addition to telling a sonic story about the legacy of the bosses and famous characters in the game. Fans will feel nostalgia over the sounds in this battle. The sounds are an ode to the brilliance and creativity of legacy that Blizzard has created in the field of game audio.

~MJ

Countdown

My next project doing sound design for motion graphics! This was a fun one to do, and I especially love the sharp clicking sounds that the numbers make at the end.

I’m taking a few classes at Pyramind again. In a few weeks I will pass the Pro Tools 210P test, achieving my last certification I need to be an expert. I passed the 310M test at the end of last year. I’m really looking forward to it.

My next series of projects will be creating stingers, in conjunction with more UI demonstration.

Later down the road I will be making videos of some FMOD and Wwise sessions I have been creating for made-up video game levels. These will be walkthroughs of how I made and varied certain sounds in tandem with the guidelines for the level.

Cheers!

~MJ

Resistance 3 Game Trailer

I’m excited to post my newest project for myself, the reworking on the live action trailer for a game called Resistance 3. I really wanted to do a mix entirely void of music, where the sound design will ultimately shape the piece, rather than the music. I also chose to go for a very subdued mix compared to my other, more robust ones.

I got to record and work with a lot of train noises. The creaking noise that you hear actually isn’t from a train, it’s from me recording the sound of a squeaky wooden door multiple times at different speeds. It added in exactly the old school element I needed to my train sound. I also got to practice a lot with an idea I dub spatioacoustics, which is trying to correlate the distance and shape of the sound as it appears in the picture (a ball bouncing far away would sound softer and would contain more reverb for example).

Overall I’m very pleased with how this came out and will continue to practice with other forms of media. Gotta keep the chops up!

~MJ

Victories using ze chocolate syrup!

Why yes, this is indeed audio related! For weeks and weeks my client has been ripping my monster sounds to shreds. “Needs to be bigger with less layers, more guttural, more crazed and chaotic.”

As I’m making chocolate milk I noticed the *blub* sound it made when the container was almost empty. I recorded it, processed it with a jackhammer I recorded a few days prior, and yelled into a vocoder with both sounds as impulses with plenty of reverb. I submitted it a day early; my client absolutely loved it.

I just solved a huge work problem by making chocolate milk. Victory never tasted so sweet.

P.S. no April Foolery with this one. This is very real! Yee haw!

~MJ