Skill/Ability: Audio Pre and Post Production

Titan is the story of this cycle, illustrating the interplay between several of its permutations; a cloud of krill, a whale, fisherman, and their environment.

Currently in development, this film will combine traditional as well as 3D animation, 2D fx/compositing and digital illustration. It is the most recent product of my ongoing musical collaboration with programmer, musician and artist Walter Harris. What began solely as an attempt to rebuild a functional musical partnership through the internet eventually yielded the process by which Titan was imagined.

Interestingly, the inability to physically play in the same space, combined with the flexibility of digital audio production strengthened our desire to compose, and much more time was spent actually discussing the ideas and emotions to be expressed that traditionally would have been developed through jam sessions in a practice space.

This process lent itself to becoming increasingly visual as well as narrative to facilitate communication. We eventually found that developing narrative structures was a key motivator in our mode of production. Narrative inspired composition is certainly not new, as many bands have often cited such inspiration for their work. What may be unique for our process in this regard is that developing visual and thematic ideas outside of a practice space was the only way to energize the creative process over such a distance.

WhoWeAm is an online blog and research project, developed by the Imaging Research Center, that focuses on better understanding human behavior through aggregating contemporary scientific data along with documentary film making. It seeks to find common threads between our best scientific understanding and the reflected thoughts of individuals. There has been many iterations of this project over the last few years, and I have contributed to various aspects of production including media research, creative direction, 2D animation/compositing and most recently as a cameraman and lead editor. Some of the films I have edited are shown here, but additional media may be found at whoweam.com.

The See Intuit booth was commissioned by the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Science for the first annual USA Science and Engineering Festival at the National Mall in Washington D.C. The booth was designed with two goals in mind, to highlight contemporary scientific research on intuition, and as an interactive puzzle to help realize the implications of said research. More information can be found here.

Playing Pericles: Shakespeare for Social Change, was a collaborative effort in experimental theater between the departments of Theater, English and the Imaging Research Center. As its grounding premise, the project explored notions of play and the role of imagination in guiding all production decisions. The undergraduate actors performed all roles using a variety of children’s toys, kneeling around a short table in front of a small audience. I was the Creative Director of the project and was charged with both designing and producing the visuals, as well as overseeing the process of chroma-keying live action with animation throughout the entire performance. The performances were filmed against a green screen and composited in real-time against these animated backdrops, which were dynamically projected onto a screen hanging above the actors. For the resulting performances, the IRC’s production studio was converted into a black box style technical theater. The performance ran for 3 days in May 2010. More information can be found here.

UMBC/JCET Earth scientist Jeff Halverson and GEST Producer David Stroud collaborated with the Imaging Research Center and Pearson publishing to develop a new generation of online textbooks. The pilot initiative developed a module focusing on understanding the origin and life cycle of hurricanes. More information can be found here.

Of Me For You is a series of video monologues focusing on the boundary between public actions and private thoughts being experienced and reflected upon by the on screen persona. The framed lens not only acts as a visual metaphor for the split between experiential awareness and reflected thought of the persona in the video, but also as symbolic boundary between what is kept private and what is shared within the confines of the enclosure. From the outside, the semi-transparent walls of the enclosure mimic these themes by acting as a boundary and filter for what occurs within.