ABOUT

Providing the Sound Design for this stylishly executed advert was a dream. When terms like ‘go as abstract as you like’ and ‘we want it to sound Matrix – esque’ are being thrown around I knew I was going to have a blast!

The first section of this commercial is edited and played back in reverse. It followed that of utmost importance to the client was that we really ‘sell’ the reverse, through Audio Design.

This firstly meant designing tons of sound files that would be suitable, e.g. culturally significant and recognisable when played back in reverse. These sounds were subsequently put through an exhaustive array of post processing tools prior to editing and sequencing.

Many of the Sound Effects in the reverse section were designed to give the illusion that they were being played back in reverse, while in fact they were not. (Imagine the sound of a referee’s whistle, reversed – unimpressive right?). Various tricks came in useful for creating this illusion of reverse playback, including time-based pitch manipulation, and rendering long reverbs for subsequent reversing, to give a ramping up to the sound and a sense of the surreal.

In addition to the two distinct reverse and forward sections, the commercial importantly also occupies two separate ‘worlds’. In high-pressure moments we zoom into the world of Eden Hazard – or his mental space to be precise. At the fast-paced skills / action sections we zoom back out to the real world.

It was in these headspace moments where the huge, bass driven sound effects were most appropriate, a la The Matrix. We go into super slow motion in these sections, and in addition to creating thunderous whooshes and bass tones to signify the visual action, much care and precision was taken in manipulating the crowd sounds to further bring us out of reality, and back into Hazard’s mental space. A great example of this can be heard at between 24 and 29 seconds – everything goes slow, we hear no crowd as we are with Hazard – we move inside his head, then as we cut back to the fast paced action we hear the huge crowd gradually ramp up in both pitch and amplitude (this was also achieved with some fancy trickery!)

Below are three additional versions of the commercial – a 20 second cut down, and two 6-second ‘stings’. These were designed for broadcast on Sky as well as for promotion on the web.