STEWART BLACKWOOD
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Feed

"Titus is a typical American teenager in the not-distant-enough future. He attends SchoolTM, parties with his friends on weekend trips to the moon and, like everyone else, gets all he needs from the Feed - an implant streaming the internet directly into his brain. Titus has never questioned being told what to think, feel, and buy until he falls for Violet, an awkward rebel who challenges him to resist the Feed. A story of first love and the fight for authenticity in a brave - and consumer friendly! - new world." - Cleveland Playhouse Promotion Material  ​
Director: Pamela DiPasqule
Playwright: Eric Coble 
Lighting: Emily Murphy
Scenic Designer: Ian Stillman
Costume Designer: Chialla Geib

Compositions

During many of the scenes that had music (house party, a club, a car radio) there were lyrics written for Feed to sing. Therefore one of my duties as sound designer/composer was to write music for the feed performers to sing/rap. I wrote them by utilizing a DJ board in rehearsal in collaboration with the actors. They are quite tongue and cheek as they are written as a comment on the state of today's music. A few of the songs are set up below for you to listen to.   
Hold Me
Sex You In

Feed was one of the productions preformed in Cleveland Playhouse's Theater Academy Festival. It was preformed in The Outcalt theater.  

The script is split into two halves; one half of which is in a typical script format and the other half is running a constant monologue of commercials that underscores the entire show. For this production we decided that we wanted to have the commercial monologue half of the script preformed live. To aid in this, I created a custom Ableton based vocal effect processing setup. The "Feed" actors were hidden behind a drum shield where they affected their voices: pitch bending, delay/reverb effects, chorus effects, and DJ style sound effects. We then sent them out of the audio interface and into the house CL5 and then the A1 mixed them throughout the show. 
This is the zipped file if one wishes to look through how the Ableton routing was setup for the performance. I believe that it will only open if you have Ableton Live Standard or Suite, but it may only open for Ableton Suite as that is the version of the program I used while creating it. If you the find the need, feel free to use it as a basis for any VFX processing you would like.
Feed VFX Setup
File Size: 36949 kb
File Type: zip
Download File

Production Moments

Photos by Emily Murphy
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  • Home
  • Work
    • Theatre Sound Design
    • Interactivity & Non-Traditional Productions
    • Music Composition
    • Software & Research
    • Teaching
    • Sound Design For Games
    • CV
  • About/Contact