John Hagley working on OBELISK

Over the last year, the Music Composition for the Screen, MFA program has been collaborating with more and more departments on student films, video games, and animated shorts. Thanks to our incredible professors Kubilay Uner and Andrew Edwards, we have seen many more opportunities arise for collaborating with other Columbia students. We can bring in these projects as our homework, and get feedback from the professor and fellow classmates. So far this semester, as a class we have had a meet and greet with the MFA directors and producers, and started scoring roughly a dozen animated shorts and around eight video games. Networking with these students is really invaluable for our careers.

The animation department looked to our program to provide original scores for about ten senior projects (created by one senior animator), as well as two group projects known as Animation Production Studio (APS). These two classes meet for an entire year, from early storyboards to the screening during Manifest in May. It is a great opportunity for us to work with a large team (about 20 students), and to get started early on in the process. I am currently working on one of these group projects and attended one of the classes. It was a very interesting look behind the scenes of how an animated film is made, and gave me a better idea of the feel of the film. I look forward to working with this very talented group next semester!

If you would like to attend, there is a Animation Program Screening on 8pm December 11th, at the Film Row Cinema featuring:

Film Row Cinema

“Bad Magic” music by Sean Pack (2014 Graduate)
“A Spider Story” music by Sara Broshofske (Class of 2015)
Various in progress animated shorts – music by many of us in the Class of 2015!

We also had the opportunity to work with the video game department on a variety of games that were demoed at the Chicago Toy & Game Fair on November 22nd. It was a fun experience to see random people demo the games and to see their reaction. Many of these games we will continue to work on over the winter break and into next semester. The fair even had a yoyo contest, giant walking dinosaur, lots of Settlers of Catan!

Catan… Rug