THOMAS FORD

DESIGN CONCEPT

This was one of my first experiences with sound sound design. It was a short play that we devised from a children's book called A Night in Tivoli for a theatre festival at school. It contained a cast of three characters from commedia d'el arte and a small robot. The sound for the show was  combination of musical underscoring for scenes and the dialect of sounds that the robot produced. The director and I spent a long time finding the right noises and altering them to create the strained and almost life-like sounds that still belonged to a creature that wasn't alive. When the robot first comes to life, the sounds seemed odd, but by the end of the piece, when the characters begin to feel and care for the robot, the emotive noises that were being produced by a robot made out of a plastic storage bin evoked sounds of empathy from the audience.