Wow! What a crazy few months it’s been!
Let’s recap the end of my third semester at school. I decided, for some crazy reason, to take on three captstone projects that semester and finish a long overdue personal project.
Clair de Lune Orchestration Project
The first captstone project was orchestrating our own pieces and then producing those pieces in a studio with professional musicians. Orchestration challenged us to re-orchestrate a celebrated work for a small ensemble of professional musicians. We had to arrange and orchestrate, hire performers, record, and final production; the project provided a stellar hands-on experience bringing a score from the page into the studio.
Scintillating Vigor - Game Audio Scoring Final
This flagship project at SCFM explored the process of composing and producing music for a fictional video game, from initial concept through final studio production. We created music that supports gameplay, narrative, and emotional tone while working within a professional production workflow. The project included composing for a live studio ensemble, recording and production techniques, responding to creative direction, and incorporating revisions, mirroring the collaborative process of scoring music for a real-world game.
Bowes Elevators - Stereo Mix
Bowes Elevators was my final project for my spatial audio class, mixed entirely in Dolby Atmos. It is a fusion of classical composition, live recordings, electronic elements, sound design, and sound effects. It’s about an average trip that a student makes when dealing with the worst of our notorious elevators at the Bowes Center. Each instrument personifies a person, and each classmate has requested an instrument they want to personify. Their conversational dialogue was recorded and processed so that the tonality of their voice and the rhythmic quality of their cadence were personified into the instrument they chose. It originally began as a score that was played by live musicians individually in an iso booth. Stems were created from those recording sessions for use as Dolby Atmos objects.
BOWES ELEVATORS: The legendary elevators at Bowes have been a constant topic of discussion and consternation. Are they slow? Will they break down? What is earthquake mode? Will we get to TAC forum on time today? This composition answers these questions and more.
You’ll hear that conversations between instruments occur simultaneously in different spatial quadrants; all instruments were treated as Atmos objects, and most SFX were placed in beds as the instruments move throughout the space. The entrances and exits are represented by sustained tones and tremolos moving spatially into and out of the elevator. EQ and volume automation accented the elevator’s vertical descent using doppler, creating an effect that appears to whiz past the listener.
Shattered Refractions - Jayce & Vi fight scene Sound Re-Design
This is my final take on a fight scene from the Netflix series Arcane, a really beautiful animated series taken from the League of Legends franchise. I went through the entire post-audio pipeline process by hand, from recording Effort VO, music, and Foley live, to going out into the field to capture every sound you hear. It’s amazing that nearly a year of work went into this 2:34 scene. Check it out!
Summer is going great so far! Aside from relaxing and heading on vacation with my BF and partner, I’ve been cooking up a string quartet piece and a full-orchestra piece, working on sound design and post-production for 4 short films, AND working on the Berlin Sound Design Competition short this year. It’s an understatement to say that it’s been a busy one, and part of me even wishes we had an extra two weeks out of our already generous summer break time before school begins in September.
More updates to come, of course!
Over and out
~MJ
