Hey everyone!

Our winter break is over, and it has been an extraordinarily fun one! Last week I went to the Old Town School of Folk Music and educated myself on all the different types of folk instruments for about three hours. Luckily, the retailers there are very knowledgeable and were very happy to answer all of my questions!

Pictured above is their onsite store, which is not super large. But the actual school is three buildings, and they offer a ton of different lessons at a pretty decent price. They even rent out instruments on an eight-week basis for people who aren’t sure which instrument they want to learn. I thought about taking violin lessons, but since school is starting back up I decided to wait. I’m sure once I’m out of school I’ll want to take some side classes anyways to keep me active!

The project I’ve been working on during break is for an animated musical called Bongee Bear and the Kingdom of Rhythm. I’ve mainly been focusing on opening song for the whole film. The animators have already started animating, and in most cases, the songs are done before they animate so that they can animate to the music. The past few weeks since Christmas have all been about composing the song, but last week I finally got to recording vocals!

It’s been a fun and frustrating experience. For the first two hours of the first recording session, I couldn’t get the microphone to work. Naturally, it was as simple as a button on my interface that enabled the microphone to record. But after the two hours of troubleshooting, we finally were on our way to recording. My friend, Tyler Schlossman, is an avid animator as well as a voice actor, so he came over and did four different character voices for a choral line in the opening song. It’s turning out great.

Last week I also saw the film The Revenant featuring Leonardo DiCaprio. I thought the film was very well done, even though it’s not normally the type of film I would go see. The cinematography was done by Emmanuel Lubezki, who won an Oscar last year for cinematography for Birdman. You could definitely tell that it was the same cinematographer because of the lenses and sweeping long shots.

The location of the film was beautiful, and you definitely felt like you were in the 1820s just trying to survive in the wilderness. The only thing that caught me somewhat off guard was that the score was completed by two different composers. This happens often nowadays, but one composer created a more modern orchestral score, while the other was sweeping synths and electronic. Most times after DiCaprio’s character was down in his luck, the score would sweep into beautiful atmospheric synths which I think captured the environment that the character was in, rather than his pain and frustration. It was an interesting take on the score, and I’m going to look more into it to find out why they did it that way.

Well, that’s all folks. Until next time!

Katrina