Awardee: Shane Slattery-Quintanilla
Semester of Award: Spring 2017
Materials Awarded: This grant allowed for the purchase of a full-sized, 88-key MIDI keyboard/synthesizer compatible with GarageBand, Logic, and ProTools digital audio workstation software.
Project Description:
The first fully completed project supported by this equipment was a collaboration between English faculty member Amitava Kumar and me (Film faculty member Shane Slattery-Quintanilla) to create a short film promoting the release of Prof. Kumar’s celebrated novel, IMMIGRANT, MONTANA. The workstation allowed me to experiment with temporary sound design and music composition elements and ultimately to better communicate my preliminary ideas to professional musical collaborators. The final film was released online and promoted via the book’s publisher, Knopf: https://vimeo.com/277192731 Since then the workstation has supported my conception and development of a brand new course for the Film department, “FILM241: Sound and Sight.” FILM 241 (per the catalog description) “inverts the usual priority granted to the visual over the aural in film: here we focus on sound as the generative kernel behind a cinematic work. The course explores how sound can function as the driving force of story, character, and world-building, and the moving image is introduced as a way to extend the expressive possibilities of sound.”