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More Classwork!

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Well summer is officially here as my last class ended last week for the semester. I delivered a number of really wonderful final projects for all of my classes.

Classes I took this semester:

Composer Performer II

Advanced Studio Recording and Engineering

Film Scoring I

Advanced Mixing and Mastering

Music History 18/19th Centuries

Synthesis and Sampling

Seminar/Private Instruction

Below are some finished examples from school projects:

Our Advanced Studio Recording and Engineering class had us learn various microphone techniques for recording live performances. Each week, students rotated studio jobs from deck engineer to pro tools op to patchbay and notetaker as well as mix/master post engineering jobs while taking one week to full produce (that means hire talent!) a track. My week of production was a foley and efforts pass of a personal project I’ve been working on: a fight scene from the hit animated show Arcane. I also mixed and mastered a jazz duo playing Hancock’s Maiden Voyage. Such a wonderful class!

Composer Performer II was a class about writing music you intend to perform in some public way, whether that be in person or using an installation with sound and visuals. My midterm had me playing with some fun mirror effects in Adobe Primer using a field recording walk the class embarked upon back in March. I sped up the audio to match the video, but mirrored the audio by reversing it and playing it with the sped up version.

The final: I wanted to do about simulating a rocket shuttle blasting off in various parts using my instrument (tuba) to create a beautiful melody about blasting off into space and the emotional experience through music and sound. Our poetic note for the program was thus:

April 12, 1961. 

Industries roared and cities surged forward, rising like titans from the earth, forging steel dreams in fire and light—the world accelerating towards the impossible.

10…9…8…7…6…5…4…3…2…1

Blastoff!

 
Flames carved the sky as thunder rose from the earth, the ground trembling beneath the fury of ascent. Through cloud and storm, through silence and void, we rose—carried by fire, into the vast and waiting dark.

We are stardust.

Film Scoring was by far my most challenging class because scoring anything with music ON PURPOSE was relatively uncharted territory for me aside from some very minor things I did over 10 years ago. We were assigned a slew of projects to be delivered on a weekly basis that had us composing for a variety of different film clips. The iPhone balloons was definitely my favorite of the bunch here!

Overall I produced a ton of content, and I even challenged myself to work on a Film Audio Faceoff competition over at Airwiggles for a short called Binocular Trick. Another really fun project to work on!

Really excellent way to start my semester here at SFCM. Looking forward to a relaxing but productive summer and I’ll be back in the fall for more new projects.

Have a great summer, y’all!

~MJ

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VFS Final Project - Anomaly 2

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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

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Foley!

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This was an audio project done constructed with Foley ONLY for an animation at the Vancouver Film School. This was done as a project for a Foley recording class and contains only Foley sounds. If you don’t know what Foley is, it’s basically emulating real world sounds cut to picture in real time. For example, I did all of the balloon rubbing and bumping in this short by taking two balloons and handling/rubbing them while recording for the duration of the piece. It was quite fun…and I got to pop them too! If you’re thinking “Woah, some sounds are definitely missing,” it’s because they weren’t added intentionally. The point of the project was to do JUST Foley sounds and nothing else. A completed project would have BG’s, Music, SFX/SPFX, and Dialogue (this includes efforts); Foley is just one of the many layers of sound added to a film, and what we did is a good example of it. Check it out! 

~MJ