For Anyone Who Has Suffered An Existential Crisis

Animation by DaAe Kim and Madeleine Rodriguez
Music by Tiffany Tarampi and Rosie Tucker

For Anyone Who Has Suffered an Existential Crisis, or FAWHSAEC for short, follows Jones, a headless ghost. Along with his boyfriend, Chip, Jones searches for the proper replacement for his absent head. Each new "head" compliments Jones' personality in its own way, but his search continues for the one that feels like home.

During the opening scene, Chip and Jones visit a grocery store where Jones proceeds to try on cereal boxes for heads. Rosie and I created old-fashioned sounding grocery store music that created a playful feeling to match Jones' cereal antics.

The Hat Shop was the first track Rosie and I made for the animators, DaAe Kim and Madeleine Rodriguez. We wanted to create something that focused on the intimacy of the storyline, so we kept the instrumentation small and used lighter textures like pizzicato strings.

In this scene, Chip and Jones visit an electronics store where Jones decides to try a BlueTooth speaker for a head. The animators wanted small snippets of cheesy versions of music genres to play while the speaker is on his head, causing Jones to get frustrated with the constant change in his personality.

Here, Chip suggests a TV as a head replacement. After turning the TV on, Jones quickly cycles through different personalities, growing his frustration even more. This track leans more towards sound design since we layered static and clusters of strings to embody his growing frustration and anger.

Lastly, Rosie and I wanted to have the intimacy emulated in the Hat Shop scene translate into the main theme for the animation. In order to do so, we used phrases and motifs in our Hat Shop track to make up our main theme. In addition, we added more textures in our instrumentation to create a more enveloping soundscape.