Media Release
Udupi, Sep 7: Anirudh Sean Gonsalves, a young, and upcoming music producer and director, has scored the music and designed sound to a thesis documentary film that has been chosen as the finalist at The American Pavilion Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at The Cannes Film Festival 2021.
Sean hails from Barkur, a little yet a historically prominent town of coastal Udupi. The 21-year-old is a sound designer by profession and is probably one of the youngest mastering engineers to be working for the Hacienda Mastering facility in Orlando, Florida at present. Working as a secondary mastering engineer, assistant acoustician, accompanying head engineer Matt Davis, Sean has mastered and assisted in hundreds of records for Vinyl and digital distribution mediums.
The documentary produced and directed by his friend is a thesis documentary film shot at the coastal fishing town of Malpe and based on the lives of the fisherfolk of coastal Karnataka and their day-to-day struggles to make ends meet, their dribbles with ever-evolving climate change, has also won the prestigious National Student Production Awards (Best Non-Fiction Long Form & Best Editor categories) at the Suncoast Emmys 2021, shortlisted for the 2021 BAFTA Student Award, Los Angeles (Category: Documentary) and. Apart from this the film has received critical accolades and won awards at First Time Filmmaker Award Winner at the 18th International Ocean Film Festival, San Francisco 2021, Silver Award at the 42nd Annual Telly Award 2021 (Categories: Non-Broadcast & Culture), and officially selected for Mountainfilm, Telluride 2021.
Sean developed the contemporary musical scores to back the emotional narrative of the documentary, paired with head-wrapping sound design, capturing the fishermen's lives and atmosphere of the daily fisherfolk communities on the coast of Malpe. Together, they succeeded in producing a documentary that has been able to make the shrill voices of the Indian fishermen heard loudly on a global platform. The documentary is set to have a premiere in India, later in 2021.
Having been born and brought up in the coastal belt, that too in the very close vicinity of Malpe, which is the ground zero of the documentary, Sean knew the pulse of the region as well as demands of the script. Narratively, he knew his job was to make the voice of the fishermen be heard loud and clear at the global level while not doing any injustice to their emotions, their earthen bonds, and roots. His local roots helped him understand the requirements of sound designing this documentary needed in a better way and that’s why he succeeded in doing fair justice to the project and providing a breathtaking yet realistic sound design that has now acquired international fame. The challenge was to bathe the audience into the tone and tenor of the local atmosphere where the documentary was conceived, set, and shot.
Self-taught music producer Sean’s interest and love for music in general and sound design in particular, started at a very young age and by the time he was 13, he had released his first record. By the time he was seventeen-year-old, he had paired with Joel Dias, another seventeen-year-old, and Sanath Balkur who was a year elder to him, to start a band Noizbleed, which gradually became his identity. Joel and Sean had originally set up a rock band in 2012 and while working on this rock band they thought of starting a side project for electronic music. It was this idea that gave birth to Noizbleed.
It was through Noizbleed that Sean made everyone around him turn their head in astonishment when he created the path-breaking track ‘Dimensions’ that made it into the 7th compilation of Jwala, a pioneer electronic music and artist collective and record label started by a bunch of self-taught, internet-raised music producers. Recently, their track ‘Kozhikode Pt. 1’ along with Robu made waves on the heavyweight German bass label ‘Saturate Records’.
Noizbleed and Sean made international headlines by garnering the support of the who-is-who of the industry such as well-known DJ-producers Nicky Romero and Quintino with the release featuring his school friend Pranoy D’Souza as a vocalist, on international record label Ensis Records in the year 2016. Over the years Sean has constantly innovated and evolved his music and has made a successful move from electronic dance music to the distinctive genre of Bass and Drum getting the support and encouragement along the way from some of the top-rated artists of this unique music species such as Mr.Bill, Thys, Murkury and others.
Sean hit the headlines again when he started working as music director for the movie ‘Fiction’ featuring Raj Shetty of Ondu Motteya Kathe when he was in Higher Secondary School. Fiction is a crowd-funded film consisting of unusual characters and prominent names like Rajeev Ravi, Raj B Shetty, and Sanal Kumar Sasidharan on board the project. Fiction is a multi-lingual film born out of a crowd-funding initiative by 20 plus enthusiastic college students of Manipal Institute of Communication. They wanted to present their creative endeavors before the public by whatever means they could lay their hands on. Their crowd-funding initiative began with posing as statues at a wedding. This is where Sean came in and helped sound design the early teasers for the film. The fused ethnic sounds of Udupi and electronic bass music in the teaser garnered attention and were instrumental in crowd-funding. The much-awaited movie ‘Fiction’ is expected to hit theatres by late 2021.
Sean’s hard work, innovation, and creative instincts were gradually noticed by the industry. Though he was just in secondary school then, he had started creating ripples in the industry and it was seen by none other than young film director Sachin Shetty who roped in Sean along with Sanath Balkur as the sound designer and music director for his new filmy venture ‘Ondu Shikariya Kathe’ which was released in early 2019. The film went on to bag the Second-Best Kannada feature film award at the prestigious Bangalore International Film Festival in 2020, among 128 Kannada film submissions. It has recently been nominated in 4 categories at the upcoming SIIMA (South Indian International Movie Awards). The film also hit through the charts and attained the No.1 spot among Kannada movies on Amazon Prime for a few weeks, post its OTT release.
To hone and polish his self-acquired skills in the field of sound design, music production, mixing, and mastering and to look out for newer yet challenging horizons, Sean enrolled at the prestigious Full Sail University in Florida and graduated as valedictorian in bachelors of Recording Arts in 2020. He also received the Advanced Achievement Award bestowed for his outstanding achievements throughout the program, acknowledging his effort, dedication, energy, sacrifice, skill, and leadership.
Currently working on Immersive and Spatial Audio Studio Acoustics at Hacienda Audio, Orlando, Sean continues to learn and grow in the field of studio acoustics, developing critical listening environments for upcoming artists whilst experimenting further in his personal immersive audio-visual art projects at Noizbleed. His artistic vision for the audio-visual projects involves fusing the local sounds of Indian culture with the historical and modern techniques of electronic music such as breakbeat-sampling and generative synthesis paired with real-time visuals.
Sean's Updated Press Kit: https://noizbleed.netlify.app/
Official Documentary Teaser link: https://vimeo.com/514063760