Here is a repository of works that I enjoyed making in my various courses in grad school. They generally aren’t tied to any theatrical works, but they were still a lot of fun to make and I’m proud of the final products!
Responsive Composition
This is a medley of pieces created for the final project of our Responsive Composition class, taught by Alan Terricciano. The goal of this project was to trade back and forth with a partner from the class, sending each other the last 10 seconds of a roughly 1 minute long piece of music, and then responding to that 10 seconds with your own work. The following are all of my responses.
Lighting Collaboration
Every fall the graduate lighting program at UCI has a lighting composition class, part of which is to create a piece focused on Halloween. The lighting students often asks the graduate sound designers to create something with them, which has been a lot of fun! The challenge is partially to come up with the idea in the first place, but to also include enough sonic events to drive lighting changes at the same time.
For 2021 I worked with Diana Herrera, and the goal was to create a piece that transitioned from the real world through a rip in reality to a torturous carnival world.
For 2022 I worked with Jacqueline Malenke, and we based the piece off the 2015 film, The VVitch. In this sequence we compressed the time in which Tomasin, one of the main characters, is corrupted in a sequence of paranormal events surrounding the collapse of her family.
Sound Art
This piece was created as part of our Sound Art class taught by Vincent Olivieri. Sound art is a widely disparate art form, some students created physical installations, some made experiential events, others made videos. I landed on this podcast-style commentary on a subject which is important to me, after using the same approach for an earlier project where we created a work in the style of an existing sound artist (I referenced Lawrence Abu Hamdan).
Theoretical Design
This piece was created as part of our Trends in Modern Sound Design class taught by Mike Hooker. The objective was to create a piece which could be used in an engaging fashion with the SpacemapGo system in the Meyer Sound Design Studio. I worked with Theresa Ramos on the project, who provided the inspiration to base the piece on Howl’s Moving Castle, a Studio Ghibli film.
This version of the project isn’t spatialized since SpacemapGo doesn’t have binauralization software (yet), but I encourage using your imagination to envision how the various sound events occupied a unique point in space surrounding the audience!
This piece was created as part of our Advanced Sound Design class taught by Vincent Olivieri. For all of our projects we performed an abridged version of the entire design process. Every two weeks we would read a script, cast the show, discuss the pertinent themes and topics of the show in class, draft a concept statement and basic system, and create a handful of sound cues for the moments that we felt were most important to display.
This piece is the opening of a play called Amalia Breathes Deeply. The play is a one person show with no defined setting: it is the retelling of life events from early childhood until death and all of the horrors and little wonders that she witnessed in her time. Since we had full creative control over the concept of the show, I wanted the show to begin with an extended movement sequence in which Amalia entered the stage (picture a blackbox in the round) and began setting up and lighting candles on the floor for each of the characters who live and die with her in the story.
Themed Entertainment
This video is my portion of the massive themed entertainment project that the design program undertakes every three years. As part of the project we come together and build a fictional company and installation concept from the ground up, pitching company names and show ideas to each other in the first couple of weeks, and then building out the systems and infrastructure before finally creating media content in all areas to present to real world industry professionals at the end of 10 weeks. It may not sound like much, but we were absolutely pushed to our limits trying to negotiate every facet of the story of our show and the way that each area would help tell that story.
Scenic Designer/3D Modeler: Mel T.
Costume Designer: Sebastian Rock (costumes were not able to be modeled and rendered for the video walkthroughs, but Sebastian’s work was integral to our process)
Lighting Designer: Jimmy Balistreri
Sound Designer: Aerik Harbert