Melbourne Museum — Learning Lab
Metamorphosis
Composer · Sound Designer · Foley · Mix & Master
“Filmed by Melbourne-based filmmaker Josef Gatti, with composition and sound design by musician John-Paul James, in collaboration with Museums Victoria and Zoos Victoria.”
Museums Victoria — Learning Lab, Melbourne Museum
The film
Metamorphosis is a five-minute immersive short documenting the life cycle of the Orchard Swallowtail — egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly.
Shot on digital cinema cameras with macro lenses, it compresses months of growth into five minutes. Museums Victoria describes it as a meditative observation of the smallest parts of our world, highlighting beauty and complexity that usually goes unseen.
It plays in the Learning Lab, Melbourne Museum’s digital immersive learning space, and is included with museum entry.
The sound
Written for the room, not just the picture
The Learning Lab is a 15-speaker immersive room. That changed how the whole score was built.
Rather than mixing a stereo bed and spreading it around the space, each track was sent to its own speaker and panned deliberately — so sound moves through the room the way the subject moves through the frame. The audience isn’t listening to a film play in a room. They’re standing inside it.
I carried the whole audio chain: composed the score, recorded and built the foley, designed the sound, then mixed and mastered it for the room itself. Doing all of it meant one idea could survive intact from the first sketch to the final speaker layout, without being handed off and flattened along the way.
- Format15-speaker immersive room
- RoutingPer-track, one track per speaker
- ScopeScore, foley, sound design, mix, master
- RuntimeFive minutes
- VenueLearning Lab, Melbourne Museum
Key art
Credits
- Director, Cinematographer, EditorJosef Gatti
- Composer, Sound Designer, MixerJohn-Paul James
- ProducerRob Innes
- Museums VictoriaAli Sanderson, Maik Fiedel, Richard Pilkington
- Zoos VictoriaMelvin Nathan