Following a stellar career in film, television, and academia, Professor Damian Candusso joined QUT as the head of the School of Creative Arts in 2019. He is the driving force behind the establishment of the QUT XR Screen Futures Hub which brings together cutting-edge digital capabilities, technology and research for immersive digital screen and digital performance futures.
“We established the XR Screen Futures Hub to cater for creatives in entertainment but also developments in digital cultural preservation, health, design, education, engineering and more,” Professor Candusso said.
“It provides businesses, researchers and students with state-of-the-art facilities to capture impossible shots and bring what we could once only imagine to life, from dinosaurs to vehicles capable of calling for help at the scene of an accident.
“It’s also helping QUT build an international reputation as a creative solutions provider through our innovative use of emerging extended reality technologies which are leading to some fascinating collaborations.
“It’s an exciting time because technology is changing so rapidly. My work is always evolving and now it has real world application.”
Turning dreams into reality
As a teenager in regional NSW, Professor Candusso had a photo of a mixing desk on the wall of his bedroom to keep himself focussed on his dream of working in sound.
The Griffith High School captain was always playing around with music and computers, building a MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) for his Year 10 electronics project.
By the time he began his Bachelor of TV, Film Production and Fine Arts at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, Professor Candusso had been performing as a DJ.
“I played guitar badly in a local band, but I was better at making music with computers,” he said.
“When I went to university, I had ambitions to become a record producer but once there, studying film, I found myself creating soundtracks for projects by other students.
“I had some work experience at Trackdown Studios which was housed within the legendary Yoram Gross Studio building where Blinky Bill and many other animations were produced.
“When I finished university, Trackdown employed me full time and my first job was on the Bananas in Pyjamas album for the ABC.
“I then began to specialise in sound for television and film, designing sounds that don’t really exist.”
The big break: television and movies
During this period, Professor Candusso also worked in the music industry with artists including Iva Davies (from Icehouse) and The Allniters but his big break came when he went freelance and was hired to work on the Australian-American science fiction television series Farscape.
“Produced by The Jim Henson Company and Hallmark Entertainment, Farscape ran for four seasons from 1999 and was enormously popular. I was a dialogue editor on 23 episodes, and it launched my career,” Professor Candusso said.
The many highlights since have included working as the sound effects editor on The Great Gatsby, Australia, Happy Feet, The Lego Movie and much more.
“Sound is such an important part of the story-telling process, especially as you have the ability to support and help sculpt the narrative. Even something as simple as birds in a tree, for example, has its complexities. You have to consider the implications of that sound and its choice for a given shot, and the overall story. What birds are they? Are the birds chirping happily? Are they reacting to something? This can tell us a location, time of day and any impending danger – just from the sound, without needing to actually see the bird.
“To me, the original Star Wars film is the pinnacle of sound creativity in film.”
There have been many accolades for Professor Candusso, including several nominations for Motion Picture Sound Editors Golden Reel Awards. In 2001, he was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal in the Queen's New Years Honours List for his services to Australian society and Australian film production.
The call of academia
Professor Candusso’s research career started when he worked on Australia’s first 3D animated film - Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole in 2010. It led to him doing his PhD in immersive cinema, 3-D film and the soundtrack at Australian National University and to taking a deeper dive into immersive media and exploring the connection between soundtrack and imagery.
While he continued to work as a freelancer for film and television, Professor Candusso returned to Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga as a lecturer in screen, sound and music technology. He also supervised postgraduate students in study areas including musical online collaboration, analogue and digital sound production, virtual reality and spatial sound.
Snakes and sound
It was at his home studio in Wagga Wagga though that he witnessed a phenomenon that led to his most unusual experience working with sound.
“I discovered brown snakes were drawn to particular sounds, probably because of their low frequency,” he said.
“When I moved to Brisbane, I ended up collaborating with Dr Christina Zdenek from the University of Queensland’s School of Biological Sciences.
“We had 26 snakes in the studio over two weeks, including Taipans, to prove that contrary to popular belief, snakes can hear and react to airborne sound.”
“We played three different sound frequencies to captive-bred snakes one at a time in a soundproof room and observed their reactions.
Art meets science
This intersection of art and science is what inspires Professor Candusso today.
“I like to use my creative background as a link that can bring together senior university leadership, research, learning and teaching and real-world industry experience,” he said.
“The QUT XR Screen Futures Hub is representative of that. It has allowed us to establish unique collaborations and partnerships in Indigenous cultural preservation, virtualisation in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector, screen futures and immersive interactive experiences in education, health and agriculture.
“We have been working with Queensland Museum, for example, on how to take physical artefacts and turn them into digital ones, therefore taking them to a greater audience and allowing us to digitally preserve history for future generations.
“It has created experiences for our students they cannot get elsewhere.
“I love film and entertainment but, more than that, I love looking at how sound, VR and other immersive technologies can be of benefit in education, health and cultural preservation.”
Professor Candusso is leading the ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) Mobile 3D Artefact Digitisation Lab project. The project will address critical challenges in preserving and disseminating Australia’s cultural heritage by augmenting Australia’s capacity in 3D digitisation.
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