Lead Artist: Jim McKee Grant Amount: $34,600

Project Title: Shared Stories
Recipient Organization: LifeFlow
Lead Artist: Jim McKee
Other Collaborating Artist: Barney Jones
Grant Amount: $34,600
Genre and Date Awarded: Media Arts, 2006
Presented: Summer 2007 and ongoing
Web link: http://lifeflow.org/sharedstories.php

Sound designer, composer, engineer, and producer Jim McKee and composer and sound designer Barney Jones collaborated with LifeFlow to produce Shared Stories, an online audio installation featuring stories by and about family members who are caring for elder relatives or aging parents.

The need for families to better understand elder issues is profound: A study by the National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP estimates that 44.4 million American caregivers, ages 18 and older, provide unpaid care to another adult and the number of aging Americans is soaring.

The finished work is eight six-to-eight minute audio compositions that weave together ambient sound, interviews and stories by diverse caregivers about their experiences helping people through some of the toughest ordeals of life—aging and death. McKee wrote, “The story telling of caregivers and professionals is some of the most compelling and passionate material I have had the opportunity to work with.”

The Shared Stories audiographs are being presented as an ongoing LifeFlow Internet program on elder care (http//www.lifeflow.org/sharedstories). The series was augmented by three one-hour call-in programs on radio station KALW and readings of works of poetry and prose that reflect on end-of-life care. Edited versions of the call-in programs, focusing on “Decisions and Difficult Conversations,” “Caregiving and Self-care,” and “Hospice Myths and Quality End-of-Life Care,” also are available through the LifeFlow Web site, and linked to other Web sites. They are being sent to additional online venues.

LifeFlow is dedicated to bringing comprehensive information and resources to families caring for an elder or providing end-of-life care. Its programs help families grow familiar with, identify, support, enhance, and advocate for quality of life for elders and aging parents. Through collaborating to create Shared Stories, LifeFlow was able to facilitate further communication through the compelling voices of active caregivers. The public is invited to contribute additional stories to LifeFlow on-line.

Lead artist Jim McKee has extensive experience with the audio medium. He is an active owner of earwax production inc., which he co-founded in 1983. With earwax production partner Barney Jones, McKee enjoys the reputation of having been voted “best sound design team in San Francisco.”

LEAD ARTIST

Jim McKee

Jim McKee received his Master of Fine Arts from the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland, California, and his Bachelor of Music Education from Shenandoah Conservatory of Music in Virginia.

As a sound designer, composer, engineer and technical producer, McKee works primarily with computers, samplers and tape, using concrete sound elements and human voice to build impressionistic and abstract sound environments. Works are generally designed in collaboration with film producers, playwrights, radio producers, performance artists and product designers using multi-track recording, samplers, digital editing, computer synthesis and a wide variety of studio processing techniques. His experience includes mixing, engineering and sound design for national broadcast television, radio, commercial and drama, research and production for interactive, multimedia and DVD/CD-ROM.

Radio credits include Lost and Found Sound, The Sonic Memorial and Hidden Kitchens for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, as well as feature programs for Radio Atelier Finish Broadcasting, New American Radio, Soundprint, and PRI. Film credits include: Cast Away, Final Fantasy, IMAX films; Whales and Yellowstone for Destination Cinema; special effects sound design for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Secret Garden, and The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River, a multi-screen interactive exhibit present at the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles in collaboration with The Labyrinth Project at the University of Southern California.

In additional to earwax production’s “best sound design team” recognition, the company has won honors in The Bay Area Theater Critics Circle awards, Northern California Broadcasters, Association of Independents in Radio; grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; and the Academy Award for Francis Ford Coppola’s production of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for which McKee contributed design concepts and sound effects along with the sound team of Columbia Pictures and American Zoetrope. For over 15 years he has worked with the Kitchen Sisters, who have received Peabody awards in 1999, 2002, 2003 and the NFCB Golden Reel and DuPont-Columbia award in 2005. He also received Peabody Awards in 2002 for Sonic Memorial, in 1999 for Lost and Found Sound.

COLLABORATING ARTIST

Barney Jones

Barney Jones, a collaborating artist on the project, has created soundtracks for film, TV, radio, interactive computer, corporate video, and theater for clients from Apple to American Zoetrope. Born and raised in the Middle East, with a strong background in multicultural art, his work often focuses on storytelling in an interactive environment. Jones has worked on interactive projects for Living Books, Hasbro Interactive, and Disney as well as some of the groundbreaking interactive work like Apple’s Visual Almanac and the National Geographic videodisc project GTV. He created the audio mixes for Boston Chinatown, a set of 45 video stories drawn from interviews. With McKee, Barney Jones has produced many audiographs, using edited interviews combined with music and ambient sound to create forms that are part documentary and part musical-poetic. Several of these pieces, like “Songs from the Tenderloin,” “Wake for Tom,” and “Virtual Paradise” have received periodic play for decades. He is currently employed as music and sound editor at Pixar Animation Studios.