Sound designer/engineer Weston Fonger, whose clients over the years include Coca-Cola, DirecTV, Mitsubishi, Suzuki, Colgate and Lexus, has joined music/sound house Yessian which maintains offices in New York, Detroit, L.A., and Hamburg.
Fonger’s spots for Carmax and Hyundai aired during the 2011 Super Bowl. He has also been judging the Sound Design category at this year’s AICP Show.
Fonger studied Communications and Music at UMass Amherst and Music Production and Engineering at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. He began his career in New York at Howard Schwartz Recording (HSRNY) assisting automated dialogue replacement (ADR) sessions on projects like The Simpsons and X-Men: The Last Stand before migrating his way to audioEngine, also in NYC, where he worked as a mixer/sound designer for almost five years for clients such as HBO, Sony, Converse, Revlon and Visa.
Fonger’s longer format work includes animation films for Academy Award-nominated animator Bill Plympton, several TV pilots for comedian Dave Attell, Brian Iglesias’ documentary film Chosin, the feature film Aardvark by director Kitao Sakurai, and a film about R&B artist Maxwell titled Five Days of Black. Fonger also did mix and sound design for Green by Sophia Takal, a 74-minute drama that won awards at this year’s SXSW Festival.
Vatican, Microsoft Create AI-Generated St. Peter’s Basilica–For In-Person and Virtual Visitors
The Vatican and Microsoft on Monday unveiled a digital twin of St. Peter's Basilica that uses artificial intelligence to explore one of the world's most important monument's while helping the Holy See manage visitor flows and identify conservation problems. Using 400,000 high-resolution digital photographs, taken with drones, cameras and lasers over four weeks when no one was in the basilica, the digital replica is going online alongside two new on-site exhibits to provide visitors -- real and virtual -- with an interactive experience. "It is literally one of the most technologically advanced and sophisticated projects of its kind that has ever been pursued," Microsoft's president Brad Smith told a Vatican press conference. The project has been launched ahead of the Vatican's 2025 Jubilee, a holy year in which more than 30 million pilgrims are expected to pass through the basilica's Holy Door, on top of the 50,000 who visit on a normal day. "Everyone, really everyone should feel welcome in this great house," Pope Francis told Smith and members of the project's development teams at an audience Monday. The digital platform allows visitors to reserve entry times to the basilica, a novelty for one of the world's most visited monuments that regularly has an hours-long line of tourists waiting to get in. But the heart of the project is the creation of a digital twin of St. Peter's Basilica through advanced photogrammetry and artificial intelligence that allows anyone to "visit" the church and learn about its history. The ultra-precise 3D replica, developed in collaboration with digital preservation company Iconem, incorporates 22 petabytes of data — enough to fill five million DVDs — Smith said. The images have already identified structural... Read More