Soundscape | Unearth

This is a little unusual compared to most things I post. I'm taking a Sound Design class this semester and one of our first big projects was to make a soundscape. I am even more intrigued by sound design than I was before, especially since this is my first foray into the audio world. The idea I pitched was to have an explorer walking down a cave or tunnel and then waking up an ancient mechanical being. I thought I was being a little too ambitious considering my lack of knowledge and class load, but I wanted to try to do something that was organic, mechanical, and ethereal. I'm actually pretty happy with out this turned out for a first attempt at sound design.

I recorded everything you heard by hand using a field recorder and a studio mic for the singing portion. I even played bongo drums for the background beat. Then I mixed it all together in Pro Tools 11 (audio editing software). Recording some of the natural stuff was fairly straight forward, like dropping rocks in a tunnel, or recording a bubbly stream. But the robot noises were a little more difficult. I recorded things like a little r/c quadcopter, an Xbox360 disc drive opening and closing, aerosol cans for hissing noises, and screwdrivers scraping along metal. For the main transition noise before the robot shows up I recorded my fingernail running along a guitar string. I also capture the noise of a heavy metal washer spinning down onto the top of a bongo drum. When I went out into the woods, I found a dead log and thick dead stick. I hit the stick on the log and I ended up using those noises to help fill in the drum beats and make them more organic. So I just recorded a bunch of cool sounding noises, then patched them together in the mix.

I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I had fun making it!

My friend Seth Weedin made the visualizer for me, you can check out the work soundscape and music he makes on his Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/breaklinemusic

Rigid Bodies Simulation | Shattering Window v001

This is my first attempt at a rigid body destruction simulation with Bullet in Maya 2015. I wanted to simulate a window shatter from a shop's storefront. I had an overly ambitious idea, but I scaled it back to just make a coatrack fall through the window, shattering the window and eventually breaking a wooden crate underneath it. This is a playblast of where I'm at so far. It's gonna be really fun to render this out. There are some glitches and weird twitchyness going on that I have to figure out, but I'm happy with how this is turning out so far. It's really fun to watch things get destroyed!

Sol Concept Art | Mountaintop Village

Here is a piece of concept art I painted for our Junior Collab project, Sol. I spent a lot of time on it, and for my second piece of concept art ever, I think it turned out okay. It's a tribal mountain village built next to a door in a mysterious cave, which turns out to be the door to a buried mothership. I spent too much time fiddling with brushes and figuring out how to get good clean edges, but in the end I learned a lot. I still suck at drawing in perspective, so it was a real struggle to show depth. I tried to concentrate on value and scale in order to push things back or bring things forward. I definitely enjoyed turning on music and painting for hours. I will get faster. Just needed to move, so I didn't include all the details I could have.