TweetShareShare When Helena McGill and Anna Wozniewicz met back in undergrad at Chapman University’s film school, they became good friends early on and started collaborating not only on everything from school projects to independent films. Then, in 2016, they were presented with the opportunity to be a part of Chapman’s first VR project – a big horror film in collaboration with AMD – which opened up an entirely new world of sound mixing.
The name “Noctvrnal” was an inside joke. Sound designers are notorious for having the most restrictive sleeping schedule during post production season at film school. We sat down with Helena and Anna and talked about storytelling, recent recognition, their co-founding relationship and being women in a heavily male-dominated technical discipline.
And what the heck is spatial sound design? Spatial sound is a powerful tool for immersion, accessibility, and UX design in all XR applications, and allows you to attach audio to specific objects that are then panned around the virtual space. Think Marco Polo – but in VR. We were warned by several of our mentors that entering into a business relationship with a close friend was risky, but we never felt this would be a roadblock to developing a strong company – and we’re still best friends. We jokingly refer to each other as “partners, not ‘partners’,” because of how often we are asked if we’re romantically involved – DURING business engagements.
In the first year as a company, we had a handful of colleagues repeatedly ask us if we were “still doing our company thing,” which was invalidating and frustrated us that they weren’t taking us seriously. As mentioned earlier, we’ve also been mistaken quite frequently for romantic partners, and have had to clear that up for clients during business meetings.