Focus: Adam Shaening-Pokrasso
May 22, 2008
by Zoe Banks, BAVC’s Training Advisor
In the third installment of FOCUS, the BAVC Interview Series, Zoe Banks introduces you to Adam Shaening-Pokrasso from Sound Arts Recording Studio to discuss all things audio, Elements and interactive.
ZB: Adam, how did you get here?
ASP: I moved to San Francisco because I had an interest in fine art. I applied to several art schools and found myself leaning towards the ones that were more conceptually based and I wanted to steer away from trade schools.
ZB: Where are you from?
ASP: Santa Fe, New Mexico. My sight was set on Cooper Union and when I wasn’t accepted there I was so angry I decided to go to the other coast, like “Yeah, California, that’s cool!” I started at the San Francisco Art Institute as a painting major and completely steered quickly away from painting and right into New Genres, a conceptual department doing installation audio and video. I had some previous experience in New Mexico doing video editing on earlier linear-based system using video mixers; it was totally old school and not something that I would have ever pursued if that was the only tool set that I had. A friend of mine got Final Cut Version 1 when it first came out and it was a revolutionary thing for me because I found that it was a nice marriage between the traditional tool set of painting and drawing that I had. My dad’s a working painter and artist and printmaker so I come from a background of arts. So, immediately finding an interest in video and right from the get-go seeing the way linear worked and being like “this sucks but this non-linear thing is awesome.” It’s funny, thinking about it–I taught my mom and dad how to use computers and a lot of my friends were a little bit computer-illiterate. [With my] intuition about a lot of this stuff, it turned out that I was everybody-and-their-brother’s tech support.
ZB: And you enjoyed that?
ASP: Naaaaahh. Not so much. But it was a point of inspiration. It did clarify that I had proper intuition about how to problem solve. [At SFAI] a lot of the students wanted to learn how to make videos and [since] I had some knowledge about it, I started to teach some private classes at the Art Institute, teaching students how to use Final Cut Pro. That turned into “Ok, this is something that I’m comfortable doing” and when I graduated I immediately had to find a job in the industry and it went from fine art to corporate videos and talking heads and motion graphics. So that’s what brought me to San Francisco and into the video field. If I had said five years ago that I was gonna be an artist I would have had no idea that it would have had to do with technology and Final Cut Pro. I thought it would have been concept-based, inspiration-based, and video was just part of it.
ZB: What projects are you working on now?
I’m so maxed out with other things. Right now it’s primarily running a business and recording production.
ZB: What business is that?
ASP: I own and operate Sound Arts Recording Studio. Sound Arts is a multi-faceted audio facility that caters to every aspect of audio production and is, in many ways, mimicking many of the BAVC community-driven components to build a community around the audio production field. We do standard recording for bands, recording voiceover for corporate and website-driven clients, but we’re really trying to grow a community component where engineers share an interest in learning and interns hang out and participate in things to get peripheral knowledge and eventually they will own and operate this business or another business like it. I think it’s a brewing facility for audio in the Bay Area. When we started this business, Brian Schmierer and myself, we both got out of Art Institute and had never really intended for this space to be for music and traditional audio, we really wanted to create a space that approached sound as a fine art form and not as music or video as an industry but as a unique and distinguished art form in itself, which is what inspired us to call it Sound Arts. It’s not about voiceover or audio for video, it’s about the art form and how it can grow to become a fine art form, in and of itself. That was the inspiration for the place but you have to make money doing it too, so we do all kinds of jobs. We’re starting to make money, working with people throughout the nation doing call-in so we can do recording here but our client can be in New Jersey.
ZB: When did you start Sound Arts?
ASP: About two and a half years ago. We were in a situation around the beginning of this year where Sound Arts decided to take on an educational component and since then we’ve been inspired by BAVC to do a sponsorship program where artists get free recording time for a week. Interns get to be the lead engineers, it’s a serious crash-course bootcamp on recording and working with artists and pre-production. The idea is that at the end of the week we get a compilation with everyone’s name on it, a bunch of tracks from all different genres and everybody promotes the project. The engineers say, “Hey I’m an engineer, I can work for you” and the artists are saying “Hey, we have this great recording at an awesome studio with really good people working on it” and we’ve got both content to distribute with a really good experience. It’s called the Sound Arts Residency/ Sponsorship Program. We’re planning to write grants and look for funding for this so it can be an ongoing thing so that once a month.
ZB: Sounds like BAVC’s Producer’s Institute but for musicians and engineers.
ASP: Exactly.
ZB: When did you start teaching at BAVC?
ASP: About 8 months ago.
ZB: Me too! How did that come about?
ASP: Well, somebody who was supposed to teach a Logic class couldn’t teach it, so they brought me in on short notice and apparently I had pretty good reviews.
ZB: How do you feel about BAVC? First impression?
ASP: Honestly, my first impression of BAVC was three and a half years ago when I took a tour with Lise Swenson at the Art Institute and Lise was probably one of my first windows into how to bridge the gap between making money in the industry and making art and being passionate and connecting people through technology. She was really cool about teaching us story and concept at the same time as teaching us tools. She took us on a tour of BAVC and it was like “Oooh and aah and this is crazy” and I always wanted to take classes. I even applied for a job at BAVC when I was out of school, in a different department, and I didn’t get it. I think it’s ironic because if I hadn’t pursued Sound Arts as an independent business initially and taking that on myself and explored how to manage living in the Bay Area and paying rent as an independent contractor, I don’t think my value to BAVC would be the same but I had set my sight on wanting to work with BAVC a long time ago. I think that it’s a significant organization in the Bay Area. I think it’s got a great connection and balance between education and experience in the industry and its merits and reputation and potential are really strong. It’s definitely a great organization.
ZB: You’ve been working with Elements, teaching the students of our new media training and job placement program for 18-23 year old adults from at-risk environments. How is that going?
ASP: I think the Elements program is awesome. It’s really cool that it provides the well-rounded skill set and applications [needed] to find jobs in the industry. In a way, I’m jealous of it–they’re touching on applications that are whole new fields. They see probably 3 to 5 different fields between print, between web, between video, between audio, all of it becomes very significant. I think the fact that they get a taste of all of it and can be excited about all of it, means that they’re not being forced into one field, they can pursue what they’re looking for. [The future] of the program is it’s only going to get better. We’ve learned in the pilot that it’s got a logical chronology to it. They are shooting videos, taking still photos, making drawings, creating things, making that stuff work and then beginning to work [further] with that and take it to the web.
ZB: Where do you see audio production headed?
ASP: A lot of the web is moving towards an interactive nature, where you want to feel like you’re an active participant in the web experience–just reading and absorbing is not enough. It’s the concept of Web 2.0 where things feed each other and you’re as much a contributer as you are a viewer. I think music’s gotta go in that direction. The association with video and how more and more shows have video projection components to them lead me to believe that music has got to go to an interactive place. It’s gotta do that in two ways: in the medium content, the experience of it, as well as the business of it. One website which is taking on a cool approach is called Slice the Pie, which basically makes the fans the shareholders of the music. An artist says he wants to put out a piece of music and the fans, Joe Shmoe in Idaho and Susie in New York, say “ok, I’ve got five dollars on it” and the sum of all the pitches from their fan base add up to $40,000. The band goes out, makes an album, and that album sells for $200K. So Joe Shmoe, who put his five dollars in, now makes five dollars. This is a really smart business model. The U.S. hates it because it’s an unregulated stock market. But think about it–what better stock to put your money in then your favorite band? Instead of buying a record, you can be a shareholder in that album, and be a promoter for it. Do you want to sit back and watch a video or do you want to sit there and be in control of that video in real time? That’s exciting.
ZB: Where do you see BAVC going?
ASP: It’s got such a good thing going. I see programs like Elements becoming the central core of what BAVC does. Training the youth changes the future of the industry. [We] have no idea what they’re going to create with [the tools]. I think with some emphasis on these fields [gaming and audio] we could see more of that interactive exploration into the integration with video. I think BAVC has the right idea [to partner with] more spaces in the city [like Sound Arts].
ZB: Like a non-profit monopoly? A non-profitopoly?
ASP: There are so many pretentious recording studios or pretentious shooting stages I’ve worked with that cost a few thousand dollars per day. They’re not helpful, they don’t want to spread the knowledge, they want to retain the for-profit business. BAVC isn’t like that. It’s all about the facilities and tools. BAVC is about putting all the tools in the room, then putting a really inspiring teacher in there, then a bunch of people who are hungry for the knowledge, and let’s see what happens. It’s a great recipe.
ZB: Today you taught photographers from the San Francisco Chronicle how to shoot and edit video.
ASP: So exciting.
ZB: We went down to the Chronicle to pick up the cameras they wanted to use in their custom class. It was a total Citizen Kane moment.
ASP: I know! I’ll bring in another example: [I taught] an Apple Final Cut class to the engineers who built Adobe Premiere Pro. This was a really awesome experience for me because these guys absorbed 3 days of Final Cut knowledge in one day. They are the people who actually build video editing software, they engineer this stuff and it was completely exciting. I felt like an active participant in the development of these tools–they also wanted to talk to me, to get my thoughts, to see what I like about Apple software compared to Adobe. It’s so cool that [under one roof] BAVC is teaching youth to create with new tools and training the people who are developing the software. This is where it all comes together, you know?
More information about Adam’s projects can be found at www.soundarts.org and www.adamshaeningpokrasso.com
Entry Filed under: Education, Uncategorized. Tags: BAVC, sound arts, bavc instructors, Adam Shaening-Pokrasso.
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