Love Them First: Lessons From Lucy Laney Elementary, the Kare 11 documentary I scored, had a great run at the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Film Fest. It won Best Minnesota Made Documentary and sold out more screenings than any film in the festival's history.
I attend a monthly documentary club in the Twin Cities, where directors screen their works-in-progress. When Kyle Whitney shared his footage of interviews with nuclear bomb survivors in Japan, my jaw dropped at these stories he captured.
I've been working on my digital painting skills over the last few weeks, trying to make something as photorealistic as possible. I was inspired by two reference photos, one from a friend of her cat, Remus, and one from my old dog, Dylan.
I just finished a retro video game score for Demon's Hymn 2: Prelude of Night. Will Tice of unTied Games decided to take on the LOWREZJAM challenge again this year and make this 64x64 pixel sequel to the original Demon's Hymn. It's an incredibly ambitious game for just 2 weeks of work. For my soundtrack, I started with the same sound palette of church organ and ghostly synths as the first game, and I introduced more orchestral (but bitcrushed) instruments like French horn and alto flute.
Two films I scored will be airing on Twin Cities Public Television in September as part of their MNTV lineup: "This is Home" by Jason P. Schumacher and "Beneath the Ink" by Cy Dodson (I co-scored this with Stephen Letnes).
I just received some very exciting news. I wrote an orchestral piece for the Banaue International Music Composition Competition, and I found out I'm a semi-finalist! As one of the 20 composer-fellows chosen from around the world, I get to travel to the Philippines for a composer immersion program in July. My piece, Balitúk: the Divided Child, will be rehearsed with a full orchestra and traditional Ifugao instruments from that region.
I recently scored an intriguing documentary by prolific director Melody Gilbert, called Silicone Soul. It features people (mostly men) who develop relationships with their life-size silicone dolls. It's one that will likely make you uncomfortable at first, but by the end you may have more empathy for the subjects than you might expect.
Ever since my friend and former roommate Mitchell Adam Johnson got a harpsichord (for $150!), I've wanted to record samples of it and make it into a digital MIDI instrument. Last week we finally did it! Mitchell played every single harpsichord note while I recorded, and I later turned it into an Ableton Live instrument. From there, I sent it to Brian Funk (aka AfroDJMac), and he put some finishing touches on it and featured it on his site.
I've always been attracted to Salvador Dalí's style, but this week I got a book of his paintings (thanks Mom and Dad!) and was completely enthralled by his craziness and creativity. I wanted to try something surreal and dense with imagery and tiny secrets.
At the end of February, I joined in on the Train Jam - a train ride from Chicago to San Fransisco filled to the brim with game makers. The goal of the train jam is to team up and make video games during the 52-hour ride. In the end, 80 games were finished! You can play them all here.
Since there were so many of us composers, I thought it would be fun to put all the music in one place. We created 63 songs, so I divided them up into five albums, all free to download on Bandcamp.