WRITING
From long, ponderous prose set in far away fantasy lands to compelling literary reportage to sardonic media reviews to technical writing to straight journalism, I continue to write for purpose and pleasure. Here are a few examples.
Joe Granato IV
A Long History in Audio
From music to voice over to film to games, I have been actively working in composition, audio production, and audio editing for twenty years. I have been using ProTools since the days of the Digi001, but also have deep experience with many other DAWs. Currently I help develop new audio products for M-Audio, and maintain a professional multimedia production studio. Here is a cross section of potentially relevant projects in audio editing.
RELEVANT SKILLS
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ProTools
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Logic Pro
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Adobe Audition
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Ableton Live
RELATED SKILLS
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Music Composition
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Voice Over
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Dialog Editing
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Sound Design
TANGENTIAL SKILLS
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Narrative Design
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Game Development
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Cinematography
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Video Editing
PROFESSIONAL SKILLS
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Product Management
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Team Leadership
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Teaching
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Public Speaking
Mystic Searches
Narrative, Voice Over, Audio Edit, Sound Design
In this dramatic read of the Prologue for Mystic Searches, I attempted to capture the dreamlike, poetic prose. Several drafts of the script were necessary due to the character of the fantasy script and its frequent alliteration, and after determining best takes, segments often had to be strategically trimmed or expanded to fit around the cadential rhythms and soundscape elements.
Den of Geek's Monster Madness
Voice Over, Dialog Edit
I was hired by Den of Geek to be the voice of their "March Monster Madness". There was internal discrepancy on their end as to the tone of performance; some wanted an epic movie trailer voice and some wanted a sports commentator approach. I maintained a library of several revisions and ultimately had to create an amalgam edit from different takes, spot recording and working in pick ups where necessary. This library was recut to generate content for a half dozen videos.
The New 8-bit Heroes
Direction, Scriptwriting, Voice Over, Dialog Edit
In the documentary The New 8-bit Heroes, there were several fun animated sequences in which the film attempted to explain the technical process of developing for classic consoles in layman's terms. This was a great exercise in revision and reduction, as original scripts were trimmed or expanded upon based on what was easy to convey in the motion design. These changes occurred over a month, and the challenge was in having them sound like a seamless VO. This is a render of one of those sequences with the VO soloed.
Caster's Blog (trailer)
Director of Photography, Dialog Editor, Sound Mixer
This no-budget spec film, the inaugural creative effort by Manasota Films, featured many fun challenges. With multiple scenes filmed at the beach, problematic wind was inevitable. With the lead talent residing in overseas, I had to mitigate the problem spots as best as possible, then direct ADR sessions remotely from thousands of miles away.
The Blinds
Sound Recordist, Dialog Editor
This independent feature was shot almost exclusively in one location. This allowed me to set up a ProTools rig in the video village and use the capability of the full DAW as Sound Recordist. This was even more beneficial considering the film often had long takes with complicated blocking. I was able to keep a very organized library of takes from multiple zoned microphones. After the production was wrapped, I also helped with a few of the ADR sessions and helped edit the dialog for the assembly.
It's Dangerous To Go Alone: The Movie
Director, Sound Recordist, Dialog Editor
This editing session was a challenge, in that so much of the dialog was dirty. With orchestra warmups in the background, competing audio from large crowds, on-camera mics in rooms with terrible acoustics, there were a lot of tricks used to keep the dialog intelligible and prominent. Incidentally, the orchestra recording had to be re-constructed from four different performances to handle dramatic shifts in dynamics.
For the Love of the Fantastic
Along with my passion and experience for audio comes my passion for telling stories. Though not directly related to the position in question, I feel that my tangential skills and experiences help paint a full picture about how I view and appreciate the entirety of the creative process. Here are a few examples of fantasy world building and narrative design to projects I have been involved with.
Mystic Searches
A Holistic Approach to Narrative
This link shows a small cross section of the fairly comprehensive approach to world building and narrative development for a transmedia project centered around a fantasy game. For Mystic Searches, we use agile management systems with rich media support to keep consistency while the expanding the lore into novelizations, musical orchestrations, comics, scripts for animations, and more. These various mediums feedback on each other and continue to drive an adventure of epic scale.
Beyond The Veil
Anchoring the Bizarre and Fantastic
In this link is a glimpse of character driven approach to building an allegorical fantasy narrative through high level character summaries and the resulting prose. The featured chapter highlights the odd party's unorthodox interactions through a metaphysical world. In the cerebral story that serves as a metaphor for the pains of the creative journey, the characters have to exist as more than a sum of their dialog.
Musing the Wraiths of Verekai
Establishing Voice (and the major role of understanding minor characters)
Providing a unique and intimate voice to the world of Mystic Searches, this self contained ghost story gives a first person vignette to a side character's strange accounts, and provides a direct link to, and dramatic justification for, the prologue game Mystic Origins.
Films, Games, Music...oh my!
Because of my experience as a multidisciplinary creative and my participation in several transmedia projects, I often find that creative impetus can originate and manifest in many ways. Sometimes game mechanics yield themes, sometimes music inspires tone, sometimes marketing informs character - it is a feedback loop of these things that creates the most compelling projects. For that reason, I'm including some the following supplemental work samples.
Mystic Searches OST
Theme Composer
I approached the soundtrack for the Mystic Searches OST like a piece of program music. Each biome was connected to a Mystic, each Mystic, a particular aura. From the spritely bounce of movement inspired by spirited celtic rhythms, to a march of exigence to a somber, vulnerable passage invoking loss and death, to the fugue-like recursion to represent meddling with time and space, this mosaic arrangement guides the listener through the fantastic world of Myrinda in a sonic portrayal of the hero's journey.
The New 8-bit Heroes
Writer, Director
The narrative challenge for this documentary is that it had to both celebrate the homebrew scene while showing the process of what goes into developing this sort of game. It had to do both of these things while telling an engaging, entertaining story. The final feature film was carved out of over 30 hours of footage captured over the span of 2 years, and the narrative was developed organically from the several orbits of common themes. It went on to win several awards, be featured at film festivals internationally, and find a home on Amazon.
NESmaker
Director, ASM Programmer
My current flagship game-related project is NESmaker, a software for gui based development of cartridge playable NES games. From a seedling of an idea, the software has grown into an international lightning rod for retro game development. As director, I managed a quarter million-dollar crowdfunding campaign, successfully courted investors, created and presented pitch decks to major retail outlets such as GameStop, and handled all update roll outs based on consumer feedback. I have managed the busines, the brand, media relations, email campaigns, social media, complex tangential projects, and a diverse team of creatives and programmers.
As lead programmer for the NES Assembly, I developed malleable, manageable libraries of 6502 ASM that can be recombined and repurposed to create various modules of games. I have created extensive design documents to illustrate the complicated series of hooks to tie ASM to front end controls, and I have developed learning resources to help users understand both the tool and low level programming.
