Bird Demo

As one of the biggest themes of the show were paranoia and tech reliance, we wanted to make the audience question their own connection to their devices, and think about electronic distractions in their lives. When the audience arrived, we collected their phones and put them in a collection organizer.

During the opening of the show, I played a fake notification sound from the speaker closest to the phones. Then, slowly over the course of the show, I melded the sounds of different notifications into the sounds of birds that played intermittently in the show. These “called bird sounds” (called for in the script) were often in the form of owls, which justified them not blending in to the birds already playing. Through their overwhelming presence, the idea of these notifications and cell phone reliance was continuously reinforced.

Creature Demo

Throughout the show, creatures known as “watchers” stalks our characters, but are never seen. As the audio was the only presence of this creature, I wanted it’s early existence to be ambiguous. For the overwhelming majority of the show, it is only represented by rustling in the leaves, movement in the trees and the wind. When the script called for it to scream, I based each off of the mundane explanations the characters dismiss it as. First, the scream sounds like a freak event caused by the wind in the canyon, which I based off of an Aztec death whistle. Next, it is debatably a call by a hoofed animal (made by blending human screams with the bellows of a deer). Finally, the screams resemble a monster attempting to impersonate a human (made by the same method as the animal calls). This demo plays 2 "wind calls”, 2 “animal calls”, and 2 “monster calls”.