Kleeb, Foley Artist

Since my move into Death By Audio, I have been in a haze of moving, circuit bending, cleaning, working, and practicing for the Columbia MFA Radio Play where I am the Foley artist.

I discovered the MFA Drama program through Craigslist, when I was applying my face off for jobs back in February. I did sound design for them in the past, taking snippets from www.freesound.org and editing things together to make the sound and music for their plays. It was a fun thing I did on the side. I made $50 for the last play. But these are grad students and have no money, and I just want to do something fun, so I signed on to do their old time radio show with live Foley sound.

For those of you that don't know what a Foley artist does, watch the following video:



Essentially, they make sound effects live using various objects and foods.

The play tonight consisted of three smaller plays. One detective drama, one communist-scare mystery, and one high school zombie comedy. I've been collecting objects for the last three months to recreate zombie attacks, gun battles, and cigarettes lighting. Although a lot of it had to be played from a laptop, it was still fun to break celery and crunch nachos when zombie bites were happening.

After a stressful week of showing up to rehearsal straight from work and being ill-prepared and super unprofessional (this hit a peak last night, and I sat depressed on the DBA roof for 2 hours), I had a glorious performance, almost flawless. It is a fast paced play and I think I proved myself to the cast and directors, despite my immaturity beforehand.

Which leads me into an insightful look at my own personality. I can work well and efficiently when I need to and can concentrate on one thing. When there is too much going on, and this happens frequently, my attention is sacrificed and I am constantly late and I look really bad. For anyone who worked with me on ALT Magazine, it was a similar situation.

That said, I am going to take a break and concentrate on 2-3 activities instead of trying to do 10. I like having free time where I'm not worried about getting things done. I like having projects, but one at a time. I'll start drumming again, refurbish my own drums, and occasionally circuit-bend something. Maybe I'll get started on this novel I've been kicking around.

On a side note, I moved into Death By Audio and built this 2 Watt amplifier the next day:



The energy here is great. I'm going to be really motivated. Things are looking good.