Photo by Al Long, III

Our first guest speaker for March was Mark Menza (www.menzamusic.com).  He has worked on projects with DNA productions like “Jimmy Neutron” and “Ant Bully’, along with the Funimation Company on a number of their “Dragonball” series.  Mark always wanted to be a composer.  He started taking music classes in high school and his first job was copying music.  He moved here in the early ‘80s to go to school at UNT.  They have a great music program there for those wishing to go that route.
Eventually Mark was able to create his own music commercially. He prefers using live players (real people), for music but rarely gets to.  Instead he uses a vast database of sampled music from software like Digital Performer.  He also says that he has to be able to perform multiple roles like Writer, Producer, Composer, and Seller.

Here are some bullet points taken from his presentation:

• When doing voice-overs there are multiple 'tries' for each take.  Those editing the project will take the 'try' that sounds the best and fits the idea the director has set forth.
• There are tons of audio clips required to “sell” an animated clip.  This includes but is not limited to dialog, background tracks, foliage tracks, and sound score..
• Due to cost constraints few shows use a 'live' orchestra as they did in the past.
• Tidbit:  A 22 minute episode typically has 8 minutes of music.  Btw, commercials eat up the other 8 minutes in a standard 30 minute timeslot.

Sound Advice from Mark (no pun intended):

• Get good dialog audio.  Having clean audio to start with instead of trying to fix the audio in post production will be far more useful to your project.
• Make connections with people.  These will help when you go to do a project.
• Get people to help you with your project.
• Remember, bad visuals can be construed as stylistic but bad audio is just bad.

Our next speaker was Jason Van Sickle of Black Olive Media (www.blackolivemedia.com) who brought his new Emmy award.  He began by passing the Emmy around the room for everyone to check out.  I thought this was awesome but I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t get my picture taken with it.  He won the Emmy for Outstanding Youth/Children’s Programming for his short film “Every 15 Minutes”.  Although he was the producer for this project, he played multiple roles since the project was done with no budget and a limited time frame.  By limited time I mean 48 hours from concept to presentation… think about that next time you’re given a deadline by your instructor.  Jason showed us the short film and it was excellent and sobering.  It was obvious why it won the award and hopefully it’ll be used by the local schools to get the point across about the tragic effects of teenage drunk driving.  He had a bit of advice as he was finishing up:  get your project done and send it in to awards and shows… who knows what will happen. 

Tom Ottinger of A Bunch of Short Guys (www.abunchofshortguys.com) came by to promote their upcoming event as Ray Harryhausen comes into town on March 30th!  Please visit A Bunch of Short Guys’ website for details.