Above: Made in collaboration with the animation studio Crash + Sues, this brief animation tells the story of a saucer-flying alien who falls in love with a cup of coffee. I created a playful musical score and assembled highly detailed sound design, as well as performing the voice of the alien, meshing score and FX to achieve a whimsical sensibility. The piece was featured on the C+S blog for Valentine's Day, and screened as part of the local SIGGRAPH's Minnesota Electronic Theater showcase later in the year.
Above: Shelby Pearson created a wistful, painterly, Gobelins-style animation about inspiration lost and found. Thinking sound effects weren't necessary, I scored some piano jazz tinged with accordion musette.
Originally commissioned as a part of "Art/ Road/ Movie", a screening organized to premiere Kevin Obsatz's 's film "Crazy Horse", this piece also showed a few months later as part of the Minnanimate festival.
Above: "Beebox" is a short animation by Cable Hardin. Junior Birdman Audio's Mike Hallenbeck provided sound editing, original music and final mix. A rough-hewn tumble of organic textures, the film explores organic farming via Hardin's generation, documentation and manipulation of frenetic imagery from Blue Dasher Farm in Estelline, South Dakota.
Above: A collaboration between my studio Junior Birdman Audio and the animation/ design house Rockne Digital, this comedic animated short premiered at the 2016 showcase of SIGGRAPH's Minnesota Electronic Theater. The idea germinated as a brief 4 or 5 second holiday greeting that we could send out in the winter, but rapidly mutated into an ambitious tale of inept adventure reminiscent of "Wallace and Gromit". I provided all things audio, from an original musical score to sound edit and final mix.
Above: The first of two reels demonstrating my audio work for the publishing company Sparkhouse, a developer of progressive Lutheran curricula. The series "Holy Moly" served an audience of very young children by presenting Old Testament stories without any use of language whatsoever. The curriculum's printed materials featured black and white paper forms that the kids cut out with scissors to create dioramas. As a stark sonic counterpart, I created a library of onomatopoeia FX to deploy in balance with more "concrete" FX, Foley, and improvised "gibberish" voiceover.
Above: A reel of original music for this Sparkhouse series aimed at grades K-5. "Whirl" offered a fast-paced, colorful spectacle to keep kids' attention. While this reel features the custom work I created as composer, I also served as FX editor and re-recording mixer on the series. For these musical cues I explored genres spanning pop/ rock, Carl Stalling-esque classic cartoon "mirroring", old school hip hop, orchestral arrangements, and quite a bit of scoring that defies easy classification.
Above: "Other Fish" is an animated short directed by Josh Roush and Josh Stifter. I served as composer, sound editor and re-recording mixer. (I also performed the dog's panting, since I had a hard time finding workable FX library assets.) It features voice acting from Michael Parks ("Argo", "Django Unchained"), Harley Quinn Smith ("Tusk", "Clerks II"), and Jacqui Duncan ("Old School", "White Lines").
In the film, a recently divorced mother seeks to prove her independence by swimming a channel of shark-infested water. It's a strange and hard-to-classify film, which makes sense when you know it's based on a dream Roush's wife recounted.
To create the musical score for such a dreamlike piece, I called on a couple of friends for help: Ben Connelly contributed lap steel guitar, audible at the very top of the trailer. And Ben Glaros shredded some power chords on guitar for the Black Sabbath-inspired passage at about :28, as well as during the coda.
