You’ve found yourself at the portfolio site of Jemma Hooper, a CQU B.Mus student seeking a new career trajectory in media composition. As a result of her previous 20+ year career in Information Technology, Jemma has strong process and project management capabilities, and can work to exacting discipline when needed. Jemma has excellent systems thinking capabilities and has been playing music, writing songs and recording music since her early teens.
Thanks to CQU’s amazing online delivery capabilities, Jemma is able to study from her home city of Adelaide in South Australia at their Ooralea Conservatory of Music, in the city of Mackay on the north-east coast of Queensland.
Jemma’s journey in music started at the age of 9, more than 40 years ago. During that time, she has had multiple musical collaborators, played in several bands, gigged around Adelaide and recorded scores of demos. Jemma has also helped to record, mix and master several albums for bands of which she has been a member. These bands include the following:
- St Marys Street Band
- Frogs in Glass Jars
- Vaudeville Stand
- The Dirty Armadillos
- The Strangers
Jemma has now published her first EP on BandCamp. To follow Jemma for additional BandCamp updates, please use the follow button below.
Jemma was involved in arts staging via participation in Tuxedo Cat’s 2013 Adelaide Fringe program as a staging assistant, and video editor for AVCON during their 2012 event. She also produced, shot and directed two short films in the mid-2010s and was the sound-recordist for a locally written and shot amateur feature film completed in 2015. Jemma was also the creative force behind AntipodeYarns – a story-telling collective that released several tabletop RPG podcast recordings. Jemma produced and edited each podcast before releasing it to various distribution locations.
A long time player of Tabletop RPGs, Jemma is an accomplished storyteller. She has four novels in progress and is nearing completion on one (over 89,000 words written). She has also written and pitched a film screenplay, a television series show bible and entered an anthology of queer short fiction into the 2020 Arts South Australia Wakefield Press Unpublished Manuscript Award.
Jemma is looking to bring together her long time love of music with her passion for story-telling in her chosen arc as a professional media composer, and is actively building networks in the film, television and video game industries. She has participated in Game Jams as a music composer, sound designer, and even as a Unity/C# coder and 3D modeller! Until early 2023, she was a moderator for the PianoBook Discord server.
Jemma is a proud trans woman who transitioned in 2017. Jemma uses feminine and gender neutral pronouns (she/her/hers or they/them/theirs) and is an active advocate for trans rights. As a result of the circumstances of her exit from the I.T. industry due to a stress injury and the following three years of Centrelink bureaucracy, Jemma is also a fierce anti-poverty advocate, and also advocates for disability rights, and the return of full control over land usage and laws to the First Peoples of the continent most call Australia.