Mike's been pressuring me to introduce myself on this blog and I've been meaning to start posting, pestering or otherwise. Hi! I'm John!

I am the other half of Whaling Ship Studios. (The name comes from me.) I'm a student at NYU, studying Dramatic Writing. It's pretty great. I was born in New York, but I spent a majority of my formative years in sunny Fairfield, Ohio. It wasn't all bad. I'm here right now, until July, and then I'm back in New York indefinitely.

While I guess you could call me a writer by trade, I do a lot of other stuff. I'm fascinated by sound, and I pay a lot of attention to sound design. I end up being the "sound guy" when we're shooting, but I love it. Even manning the boom. I recently purchased a Røde NTG-2 and it's the nicest thing I've bought in a long time. Just looking at XLR cables gets me excited. Is that weird?

While the tools of sound are great, the art of sound are even more interesting to me. They say that sound is 75% of a film, and I think that's so true. I have a hard time watching movies with my family, because they talk, or whisper, or rustle papers, or breathe a little too loudly. I can't imagine how many times I've rolled my eyes at the idea that if there's silence in the movie, it's okay to say something in real life. Recently I've discovered that I can actually watch things by myself, with headphones. It's been nice.

I was hired as the sound designer for Post Secret: A New Play, written and directed by Matt Gehring, being produced at NYU in the Fall. I'm also manning and designing scenes for the projector, which is a pivotal part of the show. It's being staged in a black box theater and has little to no set pieces, so I'm concentrating on creating some lush sound beds for the scenes and subtle imagery for the background (and postcards). As far as I'm concerned, I'm set designer as well. But more about that later, maybe.

While Mike is sort of our designated editor (he's our director, too), I've also taken a liking to special effects/post-production. I have pored over After Effects for countless hours. Very recently I've discovered the joys of 3D modelling, too. If you happened to see our Bud Light spec ad, you saw my first completed work. Yes! Hard as it is to believe, that robot is not real. I'm also way into color grading and I'm trying to break into motion graphics.

I write all the time. Well, that's not true at all. I think about writing all the time. I should write way more often. I recently finished a short play. It's two acts, but only twenty-some pages. I just decided it needed to be broken up that way. We're actually filming it soon, on a stage, but not as a play. Hopefully we'll have a trailer or something for you by July, but you'll have to hold your breath for the full production: we're planning to send it around the festival circuit. It's going to be good. I've also been outlining a short dramatic series (I have a hard time writing comedy) and we were going to produce it this summer, but some of my real-life plans changed and that might not happen this year. I'm also working on some other projects and a super-secret feature, but I don't want to say anything about the former because they're too far away, and, well, the latter is super-secret.

I'm planning to blog about the history of Whaling Ship, writing, the stage, anti-humor, maybe Blender, maybe my sweet boom pole, maybe New York, maybe some other stuff. I'm also planning to migrate this blog to a custom blog engine on whalingshipstudios.com proper after I launch the site, and after I create the site, and after I create a custom blog engine (I do all that stuff too). But don't tell Mike that.