It’s been about almost a month since the move to Pittsburgh now, and it’s been quite the journey so far. We’re into week 3 of the program, which feels pretty crazy. I’ve been learning all the names faces and almost getting there, enjoying (and trying to work hard) for all of my classes, and we are heading onto an “Adventure Module” for team building stuff tomorrow!
So one of the classes that has been taking up most of my time has been BVW (Building Virtual Worlds). We go through 6 rounds in the class of creating projects. I have my role as sound designer, and the first round (round 0) we got to score a video of people playtesting one of the past projects. We also get quite a large sound library (more than 200 gigabytes of all sorts of background music and SFX), and we also have a sound studio that has a composition station and a recording station. It is actually fairly similar to the set up at Holy Cross, but in order to use it we have to sign up through a sign up sheet, and we all get 3 hours to work in there per day. It is quite competitive to get a spot in there so they definitely make you learn how to work around other people’s schedules. Anyways, we have moved into round 1 now. They have started to pair us into teams, and usually teams have 2 programmers, 2 artists and one sound designer. I have the most amazing team this time that is easy to communicate with, super hard workers, and they bop with ideas, yet we went with one idea and stuck with it and managed to make some good progress in a week. We were inspired by Toy Story, and we are helping the robot Robot through driving an RC car. Composing music for a game is actually really different from what I have done before, because I can’t place exactly where I want to slam the music down and do some fade in/out effects. And also I don’t have a music professor to run to when I have questions, although our sound TAs this year are also fairly amazing. We demo the rounds and the interim every Tuesday and it’s really awesome to see what other people are doing, which ranges from horrifying to funny to moving, and it just really blow my mind (especially the sound designers that have no sound background) to see how imaginative and how many different interpretation there are out there!
We also shot a bunch of pictures for my visual story class, which is slowly changing how I view the world into carefully constructed deep/flat/limited spaces with patterns, shapes and lines. It makes so much sense why we feel the way we feel, but acknowledging all these processes also messes with my head sometimes, especially when you start to analyze every James Bond film. Oh well!
Improv has also been a TON of fun where you just do unexpected things. You never know what to expect from other people and you are expected to think on your feet, which is definitely a fairly crucial life skill. Out improv professor is fairly chill and plans her activities with very specific objectives in mind. We go into improv without any technologies or even note taking stuff (the TAs are there to take notes for us but they also demonstrate) for two hours every week and honestly it’s very refreshing. She also bring her super personable and awesome Golden Retriever to the ETC from time to time and he is the most adorable thing!
It’s quite cool how established the program is and how everything is interconnected. The professors are very serious about how they “talk to each other” and how we never get to make any kind of excuses to do one class’ work because we are working hard for our other class (especially BVW, and rest assured I will balance my workload and not miss homework from any of my classes, but it’s just fairly funny). They show it too by referencing some concept that is taught in the other classes, which really testifies how interconnected the curriculum is I suppose. It’s not really something that we get from different disciplines at Holy Cross, which is totally understandable (and hard if the music professors have to find out what 10 other departments are up to), but it is something that is totally awesome!
Life in Pittsburgh has been fairly fun too. I inherited a garden from the previous owner from the house, which grows a ton of vegetables and I will be spending less on grocery bills for sure. I’ve also explored Pittsburgh some more, and found some awesome Mexican, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese food options. There are also three Chinese restaurants that delivers to the ETC since there is such a big demand from the Chinese students so it’s pretty nice to eat something that I am not cooking once in a while.
So, besides from prepping for the exciting Adventure module where they take us to a resort in PA and I think we get to have a ton of fun, I am also attempting cooking for myself more with different vegetables, trying to maintain a better work-life balance (by trying to get about 7.5 hours of sleep every day and not working a ton on weekends) and working out some more. I’m also trying to make every bus that comes to the ETC without sleeping over and missing it, because it’s another about 50 minute wait if you miss that particular bus. The lifestyle here is fairly dormant when it comes to physical exercise because everything is just right in the building. Also, because I simply hop onto the bus station that is literally right in front of my house right now, I don’t get to climb a hill like I used to at Holy Cross and from when I used to live in South Oakland.
Anyways, back to preparing for round 1 for the last bit before we head out for adventure module at 6AM tomorrow!