Student Gianna Agostino won first place in the Sound Design competition at the 71st annual Southeastern Theatre Conference (SETC) Convention, which was held February 26 – March 1 in Louisville, Kentucky. Gianna is a junior pursuing a double major in music and communications with a minor in theatre. She won the award for her design for the Department of Theatre production of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away, created under the supervision of faculty mentor Benjamin Stickels.
“This was my first time ever being a sound designer, so it was very much uncharted territory, and I fell in love with it completely during the process,” Gianna said. “The fact that I won at all made it that much more special! The faculty and students working on the production with me were so helpful and supportive along the way, and I’m glad I was able to represent the efforts of the entire team with this award!”
Stickels said that the award demonstrates the value of having student designers participate in departmental productions.
The SETC convention draws more than 5,000 students and professionals in the theatre industry each year. At the convention, graduate and undergraduate students display their design and technology work and can enter their work into competition, where it is critiqued by distinguished career designers with national and international reputations.
Far Away, a dystopia that is less than an hour long, was a particular challenge, Gianna said.
"I knew that a lot of the storytelling would have to come from the different soundscapes I created. I focused on transitions and how I could take the viewer from one scene to the next, while still having a sense of continuity of the overall storyline. To do so I set up speakers above, below, and all around the audience to fully submerge them into the script. The themes were dark, mysterious, and uncomfortable, so many of my sounds played into those emotions, but the trick was to do so without it being too overbearing. "
In many cases, Stickels said, sound design incorporates music, but this production had no music, requiring that Gianna craft "every sound in the play from the ground up out of multiple different sounds and recordings to create several distinct worlds that existed."