Toymaker (Original Soundtrack)

Watch Toymaker on Vimeo

My second film score was for the animated short Toymaker, which was produced 2016-2017 by a team of animation students from Brown University and RISD, led by Nellie Robinson and Professor Barb Meier. The seven-minute film, which is without dialogue, is about a toymaking single mother who sets out to build a miniature fantasy world for her daughter, only to become a little too engrossed in the project.

Nellie and Barb agreed that a full orchestral score would be out of character for this production. I settled on writing for piano trio, which gave me the opportunity to record the music with live musicians (rather than depend on a sampled library to generate orchestral sounds as I did with Jeremiah Robs A Bank). The soundtrack features me, violinist Irene Tang, and cellist Melanie Ambler.

Toymaker had its premiere screening in May 2017 at Brown for an audience of approximately seventy or eighty. The film was subsequently featured at several animation festivals and won a number of awards, including Best Music in the student film category at the Athens Animfest 2018.

You can read about the production in the Winter 2017 issue of Conduit, the Brown Computer Science Department's newsletter.