CAUTION: The following content contains the actual, unedited transcript of the Michigan Tech’s Sound Girls chapter executive board meeting recorded in October 2024.
Vice President Jos Olson: “Do you want to pull up the found footage?”
President Vanessa Dulong: “Yes.”
Olson: “I love how we say ‘found footage’ as if it is real found ghost footage.”
Secretary Jack Summers: “It’s not?”
Dulong: “Well, it’s found in our Google Drive.”
Summers: “Are you telling me it’s not real?”
Olson: “No, it’s very real, you’re right.”
The mysterious footage these Sound Girls refer to was discovered in an abandoned corner of the student organization’s shared Google Drive. The footage’s exact origin is unknown, although the group has their theories.
“Maybe the original sound girls in 2019 when it was founded had the idea of doing a horror movie short film. We found this, and it never got finished.” said sound design student Vanessa Dulong ’25.
The footage is reminiscent of an old silent film; black and white, dimly lit and with no sound. It depicts a former student looking around as if she has heard something. She wanders through the McArdle Theatre and the halls and stairways of Walker and the Rozsa Performing Arts Center alone, searching for a sound we can’t hear. The mysterious sound leads the now frantic student to a door which opens on its own. The lights flick off, and when they come back on we see the student scream. Lights flicker on and off as she covers her ears, then falls to the ground, writhing in pain and surrounded by a circle of speakers playing an unknown sound.
This footage inspired the Sound Girls to try a new take on their annual sound finals project. All Michigan Tech sound students and organizations have the opportunity to present projects from the fall semester each year.
“It also serves as a celebration of student work throughout the semester,” said sound design student Jack Summers ’25.
Most organizations create a Powerpoint slide show and describe their projects, but the Sound Girls take their final presentations to the next level.
“A couple of years ago I had the idea of doing a music video and a song, and that’s what we would show to just be a little bit cooler than the other orgs. And it worked, everybody was into it!” said Dulong, “This semester we’re taking on a spookier kind of vibe because we found this footage.”
This year’s project is a short film called Creeping Up with the Sound Ghouls. The film depicts Sound Girls watching the disturbing found footage in one of their meetings. As more and more members fall prey to the siren song, they call an original Sound Girl for help. The founding member character reveals the dark past of a silly project that took a turn for the worse. Unfortunately for our current Sound Girls, they have already unleashed an earworm that will zombify their entire group one by one.
The earworm in the film makes use of an inside joke; the song Get Lucky by Daft Punk, which the real-life Sound Girls have heard far too many times as their sound test song. As group members are zombified by the song, only Jos is immune thanks to his headphones, or is lucky enough to be out of the room when the song is played. The final scenes of the short film echo some of the old Sound Girls footage found on Google Drive, an homage to their founding members.
The biggest mystery of this project may be why a group called Sound Girls created a film based on silent footage. “Yes, we’re called Sound Girls but we want to make sure that we’re covering just media in general,” explained audio production and technology student Jos Olson ’26. “While, yes, sound is super important and it is what we do, we also want to make sure that there are other aspects involved and people are getting hands-on experience.”
Last year the organization produced Keeping Up with the Sound Girls, a single mock episode parodying reality TV show tropes set during their group meetings. This year’s short film is a larger scale project featuring actors, video editors, sound editors and original compositions from the nearly 20 students involved with Sound Girls. Several new members joined the organization because this project gave them the opportunity to learn from their fellow students.
“We’re trying to get the entire org involved,” said Olson, “There are a couple of new members that really want to get hands-on camera experience so we’re helping them learn how to do that.”
Creeping Up with the Sound Ghouls will be shown along with many other projects during the sound finals presentation Dec. 13. It will also soon be available on the Sound Girls’ YouTube channel.
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