MATERIAL INTERSECTIONS
A monthly educational podcast produced by the Colors/ Materials/ Trends Exploration Lab at Pasadena's Art Center College of Design. The pieces explore approaches to materials and methods in the practice of fine arts, graphic design, fashion, and other creative pursuits. I've composed music and mixed the final soundtrack for selected episodes since January 2009 on behalf of Tekspacular, a Los Angeles-based audio branding company.
Assorted music and sound design from Material Intersections episodes. Watch video
FATE
A short film directed by Kun Liu, shot in New York City in 2010. A romantic thriller about an assassin who falls in love and faces the consequences as life gets complicated. (The second film about assassins I've wound up working on in the past year, for some reason. Anyway...)
I not only served as post sound mixer and Foley artist (at times Foleying entire sequences shot without sound), but also composed a quiet piano piece used as musical score during a montage wherein the two characters take a walk and get to know each other. I wanted to express the tender feelings of the characters toward each other, while hinting at darker times ahead. It's a simple cue that I ingeniously entitled "Simplicity". mp3
PLAYWRIGHTS' CENTER
PROMOTIONAL FILMS
Rich Girl
Little Eyes
by Cory Hinkle
Ady
by Rhiana Yazzie
The Bay of Fundy
by Sherry Kramer
The Sense of What Should Be
by Dominic Orlando
by Victoria Stewart
This trailer appropriated the sensibility of Woody Allen's documentary-style outings, so some clarinet jazz seemed appropriate.
mp3 [0:53, 1.2 MB]
All is not as it should be in the small-town community where this play is set. The temp track used some 60s girl group music to channel the surface innocence of small-town America, so I put together a track in that style.
mp3 [0:27, 644 KB]
Yazzie's play revisits the cavorting of Man Ray and his free-spirited friends at the "Surrealist summer camp thirty years before the summer of love". I was asked to compose a number evocative of that era's upbeat, Eastern European-inflected jazz.
mp3 [0:48, 1.1 MB]
The temp music track used during the picture edit was a piece from the La Dolce Vita soundtrack. It made sense to come up with something melodic and sumptuous, passionate but slightly kitschy.
mp3 [0:54, 1.2 MB]
The idea here was to evoke the over-the-top melodrama of a comic book film, so I concocted a variety of tense cues reminiscent of classic thriller suspense. (To hear the music from this trailer, check out the "Suspense Montage" mp3 under "Orchestral" in the center column.)
COMPOSER / SOUND DESIGNER
WORK SAMPLES
Click on the links below to hear mp3s of compositions in assorted styles.
ETHEREAL [ WARM ]
Scattered Bells
Amorphosaurus
Clicky Resolution
Abundance
ETHEREAL [ OMINOUS ]
Dark Drone
Overtoney Droney
Teakettlesque
Backwards Theme
ELECTRO - POP
BEATS / GROOVES
Slowbeat
Staggerbeat
Dubesque
Melodic Techno
ORCHESTRAL
Suspense Montage
50sKitschy
Eastern Theme
MELODIC
Melodelicate
Quirky
Hope
List Theme
LEFTFIELD
Music Box Hiccups
JetEngineEsque
Whoops
Stabs and Sprinkles
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MIKE HALLENBECK
COMPOSER / SOUND DESIGNER
work samples : credits
Video reel + references available by request
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All sounds on this page are presented for demonstration purposes only. Any further use is prohibited without permission.
ENTERTAINMENT MACHINE
Entertainment Machine Theme Song
The show is curated by an Artificially Intelligent Radio Producer named Emma, who dictates the order and content of sketches as they occur. A Kraftwerk-style theme song with vocoded Cylon vocals felt appropriate. Eventually I tricked it out with some Mouse on Mars style hiccups and bleeps. mp3
The Spectre: The World's Most Average Superhero
Over the top orchestral superhero music. Starts off kind of serial matinee before settling into more of a "Dark Night"-era Batman style. mp3
Mad Lib News
The request was for an earnest news theme here, although peppering actual news broadcast copy with Mad Libs substitutions results in pure silliness, : mp3
The Ten
A game show featuring a contestant chosen from the audience. A bubbly theme posibly reminiscent of the music to another game show, any similarity to which is of course coincidental. mp3
RED AND BLUE FLY AWAY FOREVER
Whimsical and bittersweet, the film contains no dialogue whatsoever, nor was any sound recorded during the shoot. My job was to compose a musical score and provide a minimal amount of sound design to help the film tell a story with wordless imagery.
In an urban park, a child comes across a balloon stuck to a tree. I created a vocabulary of melodic swoops and sweeps (somewhere between a musical theme and a Foley effect) to match the balloon's bob and weave in the breeze as it intermittently lights up in a red glow. A shimmering chordal backdrop underscores the mystery in this encounter.
An upbeat, triumphant theme when the boy frees the balloon and runs through the city, joyously brandishing his newfound glowing friend.
A poignant, downbeat theme when things take a turn for the worse.
As the boy and a new friend try to resolve a mounting challenge, ambiguously intertwining backwards melodies underscore their frustration.
When the boy and girl figure out how to make their balloons happy, a bittersweet theme accompanies some final vistas as the conflict is resolved.
mp3 [0:24, 568 KB]
mp3 [0:46, 1.1 MB]
mp3 [0:51, 1.2 MB]
mp3 [0:32, 748 KB]
mp3 [1:10, 1.6 MB]
STACKING CHIPS
Promotional image by Jason Byron Nelson
Several of my music compositions were recently licensed for the feature film "Stacking Chips", a thriller about assassins in search of redemption. The film-- for which I also served as Foley artist, dialogue editor, and sound designer-- was shot in Los Angeles and directed by Arthur Louis Fuller.
An ethereal music cue that blends slow chordal transitions over time.
mp3 [1:02, 1.4 MB]
A scary music cue. You will be very scared when you hear this. mp3 [0:23, 540 KB]
I also synthesized some original cell phone ringtones for this film:
Ringtone 1 [0:04, 104 KB]
Ringtone 2 [0:04, 100 KB]
Ringtone 3 [0:03, 84 KB]
View the trailer for "Stacking Chips" (to be clear, I didn't work on the trailer, just the film)