Airness
Written by Chelsea Marcantel
Sound Designer: Jeremiah Tuner
Director: Eli Simon
Scenic Designer: Stephanie Bernardini
Lighting Designer: Rin Mizumoto
Costume Designer: Ashley Morgan
Projection Designer: Merle DeWitt
Stage Manager: Bri Westad
University of California, Irvine Department of Drama
2022-2023 Season
Artistic Direction
Airness follows the story of Nina and her journey in the competitive world of air guitar. We follow her from the beginning, performing in dingy bars all the way to nationals in a thousand seat theatre. She is not alone in her new experience, as she is mentored by the veterans of the art form Facebender, Golden Thunder, Cannibal Queen, and Shreddy Eddy. With her progression in the world of air guitar, not only does she find a new skill as a performer, but a place of belonging that she has continuously longed for.
Sound
Workbook
Drafting
Package
As the sound designer, I was tasked with immersing the audience into the world of air guitar. The roaring crowds, the high octane music, sonically the show should remind the audience of their favorite rock concert.
With this in mind, not only did the sound effects and music need to support this intention, but the system design need to as well. I built a system that allowed the audience to follow Nina from the dingy bars with low attendance, and low quality speakers; to large theatres with thousands in the crowd and high quality speakers.
The Supercut of Unity
In this scene, Nina is first being introduced to air guitar though Golden Thunder's performance. The script references that he uses 3 songs in his act. In air guitar, the rules state that performances have to be 60secs long max. To stay true to the spirit of air guitar, I built a piece that lasted 60 secs while also seamlessly blending in all three songs into one epic number.
Photo credit: Paul Kennedy
Transition Music
Photo credit: Paul Kennedy
To keep with the themes of the show, and to have the audience immersed in the experience, I built the transitional music to resemble short pieces that a person would perform to during an air guitar competition. This lead to transition music relying heavily on drums and electric guitar.
Dark Horse Tournament Crowd Cheer
In this moment, Nina just qualified for the Air Guitar National Championship. As stated before, the crowd not only needed to grow based on venue size, but also needed to interact with the Air Guitarist. If they do a back flip, there needs to be a pop from the audience. If they fall short the audience should reflect that. To have granular control over the crowd effects, I recorded the cast and crew performing different scenarios to build a library of crowd effects that we could use based on how the guitarist is performing.
Photo credit: Paul Kennedy