6: Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy (belated) Thanksgiving, everyone!! I hope you all had a restful, cozy holiday weekend with your loved ones. I spent the weekend catching up with my family and binging a lot of Schitt's Creek and animal documentaries!
November has been a fairly chill month. (Hehe, no pun intended!) While I do have some redesigns to show you that I'm quite proud of and excited to share, I've also been spending quite a bit of time resting and focusing on self care. I won't lie - I've been feeling pretty demotivated lately, and it's been affecting my ability to chug along as I did before. I don't feel like myself, and it doesn't feel great. Even writing this newsletter feels a little hard.
Perhaps it's the winter blues, or the post-election season politics. Maybe it's the overwhelming stress of looking for work, or the unrelenting impostor syndrome, or the fact that we're now going into month 10 of quarantine and I could really use some hugs. Regardless of the reasons, though, I'm starting to push back against it. I've started organizing myself again and even started a new redesign - it's not ready for others' eyes/ears yet, but hey, I started it!! - and soon enough, I'll (hopefully) be able to find myself again.
Sparkly, magical sound design
As for those aforementioned redesigns - I'm excited to share three pieces with you all!! I'm quite happy with the work I've done on these, and I'll be cutting a new reel soon and incorporating them. I'd also love to write up a breakdown of a couple of these later on!
While working on these redesigns, I've started realizing that I do, indeed, have some aesthetic sensibilities. I've been pondering what my sound design aesthetic is for awhile - after all, how do you really define your personal design tastes when your work is shaped by directors' tastes and by general standards of what good sound design is? - and I'm noticing that I love playing around with textures, especially the characteristic top layer, on everything. I don't shy away from any opportunity to add character through sparkle, dustiness, or bubbliness to a sound!! I do need to continue to practice letting go of my layers when needed - among other things - but I'm enjoying exploring the aesthetic that I like to build.
Other little updates
- Been working a bit with some of my friends/former classmates from SJSU on a potential collaboration! We're working on putting together an audio production outsourcing organization that does bespoke audio primarily for independent animators and game developers, and my primary role is to work on production/project management and (of course) sound design. We've still got a lot of planning ahead of us, and I'm not quite sure what our future is at the moment, but I'm excited to share any updates with y'all as they come up!
- Since the first keycap set I've ever purchased (a peach Infinikey Pastel PBT set!) will ship soon, and I'll be purchasing a second keycap set from The Key Company's Magic Girl group buy, I've been diving deeper into the keyboard hobby! Mostly just researching for now, but someday I hope to get to start practicing soldering and trying out an assortment of switches.
- Media consumption: Genshin Impact, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Spellbreak, Ikenfell, Nice to Meet You, Schitt's Creek, My Octopus Teacher, Our Planet, The Princess Switch series
Follow-up
A quick note - if I owe you an email or DM response, I'm so sorry it's taken me awhile to get back to you!! I'm realizing that while most people are very gracious and patient, it's a little unfair to not provide a little notice that I may not have the energy to respond for awhile, and I need to work on being better about that. I'll be working on catching up on my correspondence this week, but thank you so much for your patience!!
& That's all for now! Thank you so much for reading, and be well!
Stay cozy,
Amerlyn