After composing music and creating sound design for films with a more dystopian theme and dark look, we wanted to test our capabilities in the media music realm and make something a bit more utopian and uplifting. This is why we chose this film.
Concept
The first thing that hit us is the use of bright colors. The bright Nike sports clothing in combination with the colors in the urban areas give it a fun and energetic feel. The edit switches between more dedicated urban sports areas, like soccer or basketball fields, to normal urban areas like a busy market, empty street, and sidewalks. This is what the film wants to tell: you can work out everywhere, just be creative with your surroundings and enjoy your urban community.
For this piece of portfolio, we also wanted to experiment with the marriage of music and sound design again. It’s filmed mainly in urban areas, portraying people who are moving or playing sports. While writing the concept, this inspired us to add a level of ‘real-life’ sounds and enhance this liveliness in the form of Foley and sound effects.
Recreating life sonically
Lots of effort went into creating sounds that we usually take for granted in our day-to-day lives, such as traffic, wind, birds, shouts, and laughter. Of course, we want to exaggerate these sounds a little so that’s where whooshes and sub drops come into play. Also, layering sounds on top of each other makes every sound hit just right.
Every footstep you hear is meticulously placed to sell the image, with the right type of shoe and flooring material. We even added cloth sounds to enhance the realism. The only sound that was harder to find was the soccer ball, so we brought our field recorder outside and recorded it on the spot.
One part that’s easy to miss is what we call ‘ambience’. Ambience is basically background noise like distant traffic, people talking in the background, breaking waves on the beach and so on. We made sure that each scene had a fitting ambience sound. Given the number of scenes, this took a lot of trial and error to get right, but this truly makes the film so much more immersive.
You can listen to a deconstruction of the sound design in the following video:
Music
For the music, we immediately thought about a more Latin-oriented approach with a modern twist. This is the reason we used sampled brass phrases in combination with recorded hand claps and beatbox drum sounds on a digitally synthesized beat. The beat is in half-tempo, this gives it a more playful jumpy rhythm which accentuates the energetic and joyful way the video showcases.
When composing to pre-existing video, it is necessary to find the right tempo for the edit. This makes the composition process way easier because it gives you an idea of the length of each musical phrase you’re going to compose.
We’ve carefully placed markers in such a way that the rhythm is in complete sync while the energy is at its peak. At the beginning of the video, for example, when the player kicks the ball, or later on when the basketball player dunks into the net.
Because of the high amount of energy in this track, we’ve decided to create a breakdown to balance out the overall energy levels. At this point, we down-pitched the brass and filtered all the high-end from the music, so there’s more room for the sound design. The perspective in these moments shifts to fully immerse the viewer into the film. This is what makes the combination of music and sound design so powerful; we play with the listener’s perspective.
