Over the years, I engaged in a number of collaborations where my contribution was perhaps a bit more traditional in scope. Namely, I was tasked with composing the soundtrack. Unlike most production scenarios, what made some of these projects particularly interesting was the bidirectionality of collaboration and content creation. As a result, at times, visuals dictated the pace (as is the case in most traditional productions), while in other situations, soundtrack required adjustments to visual pacing. Although this kind of an approach may not be most economical in terms of time and resources, I am convinced that the ensuing bidirectional creative endeavor yields better results because instead of one modality being entirely subservient to another and thereby required to fix potential pacing potholes with usually sub-par filler content, here modalities reinforce each other by influencing each other’s pace and by doing so eliminating potential weak spots. On this page are two such creations. with delicate risk (2007), pictured above, being purely artistic, and Center for the Arts Virtual Tour (2007) whose primary purpose was fundraising for Virginia Tech’s Moss Arts Center, a $100M project completed in 2013, hosting Center for the Arts and the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT). For optimal listening experience, consider using either a dedicated sound system or quality headphones.
Below is another example from around the same time. I had to compose and produce music within 72 hours for a University Media Relations (Virginia Tech) promotional video on the arts at Virginia Tech and the Performing Arts Center we aspired to build. Needless to mention, I was younger and could more easily withstand two sleepless nights in a row. Due to time constraints, composing and rehearsing with a real orchestra simply wasn’t an option, so I opted for composing directly inside a digital audio workstation. Somewhat in contrast to the previous two examples, seemingly weird timings and interruptions are driven by the video content and/or scene changes considering that this project was more of a traditional production pipeline (video first, audio last). I also seem to remember spending quite a bit of time trying to make instruments sound more realistic, particularly solo runs.