Particle Promotes Dominic Morris
August 6, 2012 by Screenmag
Particle Audio has promoted Dominic Morris to sound designer/mixer. Previously an assistant at the company since mid-2008.
“It's all very exciting for me for a lot of reasons,” Morris says. “For one, it's been amazing to grow with Particle as Particle was growing itself. I started working here before our second studio was built and now we're in the process of building a third. Today we're at a place with a really tight knit collaborative team and super efficient workflow. I think of myself as a pretty pragmatic laid back guy, so I definitely lucked out to work in a house that favors collaboration instead of competition. It's really a good fit.”
Morris discovered that he was colorblind at age 13. It was the same day that he was informed that he also needed glasses; quite a blow to personal moral at such an age.
Not one to sulk, he cut his losses and focused on sharpening his other senses, particularly his sense of hearing. The next few years were transformative for Dominic. He took up the the drums and quickly made his mark in the rock and roll Mecca of South West, Michigan. It wasn't long before assorted audio gear took over his house, making it difficult to travel from one room to another without tripping over speaker cables, stacks of recently dubbed cassette tapes, or broken drum heads.
After graduating from Columbia College Chicago in 2007, Dominic started his career at Particle. He has worked on McDonalds, Nintendo, Nascar, Walmart, Coors Light and Phillip Morris, among others. In his free time he enjoys sailing, a well made manhattan or four, and researching ridiculously expensive and unattainable international vacations. He also has never experienced or has any idea what a 'runners high' is but if anyone out there wants to fill him in, he'd really like that.
Morris has spent 2012 working on an on-going McDonald’s Happy Meal campaign entirely animated.
“Animation is extremely challenging but also the most rewarding for me to work on,” Morris says. “It's been great creating this big colorful animated world from scratch, defining each of the vibrant characters and the world they live in by the sounds that we make here in the studio.”
Mostly though, Morris says he just feels lucky.
“I guess it's still novel today when someone gets a job in the field that they went to school for,” Morris says. “Somehow this all worked out to a plan that I somehow almost accidentally implemented when I was 18. I went to college, studied audio for film, then landed a job doing audio for commercials. It just seems like that doesn't happen anymore. I truly feel lucky.”