Happy New Year!

Hey there! It’s been a while since I wrote here. The highlights for the past 2.5 years include:

• Moving to San Francisco and owning a beautiful new house! My family is here, and it’s great to be back. This is home.

• I’m about to start a 2 year Master’s program in Technology and Applied Composition at the SF Conservatory of Music on Scholarship! I’m looking forward to composing scores, mixing in Dolby Atmos, and discovering the forefront of audio technology in the emerging age of AI and how that will play a role in our industry.

• I completed my first surround sound project for a short film called Unfortunately, about an AIDS crisis hotline experience in bustling ‘80s NYC.

• The 20-minute animation project I worked on all sound for, called Oren’s Way, is now on YouTube with nearly 100k views! The animation is also in consideration for the Oscar’s Shortlist!

• I completed a fun month-long challenge over at Airwiggles called the April Audio Challenge. I challenged myself to complete sound for a daily micro short with a 45-minute time limit. You can watch all of my interpretations here, but my favorite design is below:

I’m looking forward to starting my master's program and spending more time with my family and friends in the Bay Area. It’s great to return to my old stomping grounds as an older and wiser person with a fresh perspective.

Onward and upward.

~MJ

Site and Project Updates!

Hey everyone! It’s certainly been a whirlwind of a few months. I updated the website, added my film school student projects, and made some other minor updates and reformatting. I’m happy to report that I’ve been working on a few more animated projects for some great people this spring. LionHeart animation hit me up to create sound design and mix their 20-minute pilot animatic. An animatic is the final stage of visual post-production before the final animation. It isn’t fluid like an animation, but it contains all the movements, story, and plot points the animation would have. The director hired me to professionally finish the sound to enhance the quality of the visual in order to pitch it to other producers and various festivals. I absolutely adore working on animation, so I knew I didn’t want to pass this up. The project was a blast, and I learned how to use a website called frame.io to move, review, and iterate content back and forth by using OBS to record project sections heavy on sound design or mixing nuance. That, coupled with thoughtful communication, led to a wonderful collaboration. You can check out the trailer below. The complete pilot is expected to come sometime this summer!

UPDATE: The full 20 min animatic is up!

In other huge news, pending any drastic changes, my partner and I plan to move up to the Seattle area later this year! My reasons for moving come mainly from the fact that I don’t like the climate and culture in Los Angeles. While it has been invaluable to be in the heart of the film industry, the fact is that almost every single one of my projects in the past seven years has been remote, with maybe a few in-person meetings that lasted a few days. When the pandemic hit, neither of us had enough space in our tiny apartment to do the things we loved to do—so it was time for a change. We’re very excited to have more space at a lower cost. I’m looking forward to building my sound studio and gym and to the fresh air of the Pacific Northwest; there’s also, you know, Vancouver, BC, a huge Canadian film hub, and where I went to film school, and it’s just a 2-hour drive away! I’m looking forward to this new chapter in my life and career.

With all of that said, I may not be working on any projects for a while, but keep checking back after this summer for more potential updates.

Over and out

~MJ

Well...it's been a year

A year of uncertainty for a lot of us. I think it’s also a year a lot of us said at some point, “I wish I could have done more.” I think a lot of our motivation dictates our surroundings; as a WFH freelancer, I didn’t get a lot of exposure to other professionals other than means of emailing colleagues and connecting on discord and other online forums with sound designers. I really made it a focus to share the work I did this past year and discover the captivating projects that they’re working on.

“Odd Dog” by Greyscale Animation

Earlier this year, I started working freelance for an animation company called Greyscale Animation with a really awesome team of animators and editors and have been working on their two projects: a series of shorts called Odd Dog and a longer short called Oren’s Way. The sound design is very SFX and music-focused rather than dialogue, so it’s been really fun to create a narrative almost solely through the sound!

I’m always looking for something new and fun to work on, and the awesome people over at A Sound Effect and Spectraveler came out with a sound design contest using a single library of sounds and a picture. Unfortunately, I found this contest with about an hour to spare, so I gave myself an extra challenge to do the best I could within 1 hour of time. You can check that out here!

Stay tuned

~MJ

Some Needed Updates and More to Come

Hey all, a few more updates to the site have been added. I have a few new videos over in the Sound Portfolio section featuring one I just worked on for the awesome folks over at Sesame Street Studios. I recorded a lot of the sound effects in my bathtub and got to experiment with underwater microphones! I plan to update my reel to feature some more updated work in the near future, so stay tuned.

You can check out Seanna’s Ocean Buddies here:

~MJ