Audi advert contextualisation

I'd say this was the most challenging piece of coursework for this module. The fast-paced cinematic visual style of the advert demands not only music that's equally cool and contemporary but also sleek, high-quality sound effects to match the action on screen. For the music, I thought a crossover hard rock/dubstep track would be appropriate. All the guitar sounds including the volume swell, main riff and lead plug-in sounds were recorded in one session in the edit suite. To make the main riff edgier and more cutting, I added some high-frequency EQ and a bit of distortion. After doing a bit of research on how to design a dubstep wobble, I made the bass patch in ES2 and added distortion to that as well. The drums play a very simple pounding 4/4 beat, and those sounds come from samples I recorded quite a while ago.

The sound effects were created with a combination of Sculpture synthesis and manipulation of sounds from my sound library. For instance, the fluttering bird sound early in the advert came from slowing down a fan sample in the time and pitch machine, while the shaking styrofoam sound was created in Sculpture by adding a bouncing object and using the controllers to modify the position and variation of that object.

Other sounds include the chair falling, which is a mostly unaffected sample of a cupboard door I recorded. For the fan sequence immediately before the chair falling, I added heavy flanger to all the musical elements, making them sound warped and airy. This transitions well into the chair falling, during which all the instruments except the high guitar are cut out to provide dynamics and highlight the falling chair. Then, the instrumental kicks back into full force for the rest of the advert until the Audi symbol at the very end, which is marked by a single high harmonic note which rings out and ends the advert.

MTV indent contextualisation

For this project, I tried my best to make something that would actually be marketable as a short MTV spot, and in the spirit of Retromania and the seemingly eternal 80s revival, I went for sort of an 80s electro track. Given the light and bouncy feeling of the visual elements (Japan being in the file name also contributed), I wanted the intro sounds to match the cutesy animated visual, which I interpreted almost as like an egg quivering and then hatching. For the quivering, I used a time-stretched sample of a plastic bottle cap settling on a table with a pitched-up mouth gurgle loop on top, and for the hatching, a pitched-up finger pop against the inner cheek mouth sound (c'mon y'all know what i'm talkin about), all from my sound library.

Right on cue with the MTV logo, the kick drum starts the simple electro beat which is accompanied by a bouncy bass line. Once the colourful countdown balls start appearing, a syncopated video-gamey synth comes in to fill out the harmony. For the second egg-hatching sequence, I thought about trying to find a skittery, shaking musical sound for the quivering, but I realised that it wouldn't really blend with the musical elements that were already in place. I only did the hatching sound, which is represented this time by an ultra-bright chime sweep kind of sound, which I thought sounded perfectly tongue-in-cheek contemporary. The final visual sequence shows the countdown balls falling in semi-slow motion against the colourful backdrop, which I evoked with three extra synth lines. Two are simply looping a two-note sequence in harmony with each other to emulate a kind of mid-air suspension feeling, and the third adds a nice melody above everything else with an Asian pentatonic flavour a la mid/late 90s Aphex Twin.