Student Project Movie Reel

In Ruben's final undergrad project for Audio Engineering at SF State, his class was required to re-design the entire soundscape for a short film or movie scene. Volunteering to create the score, Ruben assembled his first orchestral template to compose, sequence, and mix every music cue for Carlos Baena’s short film, “La Noria”. Combining traditional orchestra with synthesizers, choir, and live guitar, Ruben was able to deliver a mystical yet horrifying score for his team. In addition, Ruben spotted the entire session for music, foley, and ambience, allowing his team to focus on efficiently creating the sound effects and ambience. While Ruben created the score at home, he would simultaneously help his class record foley, create ambiences, and mix the entire sequence on their school's API Analog Console.

While working on the “La Noria” sound re-design project at SF State, Ruben was also working on his final project for the “Audio for Video” class. Similarly, Ruben was required to re-design the sound for a short scene in Pixar’s “Coco”. While his partner performed and recorded the Foley, Ruben produced the entire score and performed the voices of every character seen on screen. The score was composed of live acoustic nylon guitar and sample libraries while the voices were recorded without any vocal processing besides EQ and compression. On a separate note, Ruben hadn’t ever seen the film prior to working on this project!

Serving as his first official score to picture, Ruben was inspired to attempt a score for Spitfire Audio’s Scoring Competition with Kris Bowers, where thousands recreated the score for a short scene in Bridgerton. Produced entirely with the Spitfire Solo Strings library in addition with their Ableton Orchestral Library collaboration, Ruben was able to sequence a scandalous score while preparing for his undergrad projects included in this reel (“La Noria” and “Coco”).