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Nick Toons burpfest

June 13, 2013
commercial, music, sound design
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I worked on this a couple of months ago – I am a bit behind on keeping things up to date due to various significant personal things going on (getting married being one of them woop woop!) so just putting it up:

Derek Best of Nickelodeon fame asked me to produce a bit of music and sound design for a Nick Toons advert – we tried a couple of different options but the vibes of my dubstep versions were a bit too heavy so Derek found this lovely bit of Ballet by Delibes (Coppelia) and instructed me to mash it up a bit.

I started by chopping up the track into individual notes in my sampler, then constrained it to tempo, chopped it up more, programmed a load of drums, did a tempo ramp for the finale, added more drums, and boom: classical music for the kids with a bunch of childishly wonderful farts, burps, zaps and swooshes added for good measure.  Enjoy!

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Carling: Trick Shot

June 13, 2013
commercial, music
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Carling are using a piece of my music on their new ‘Trick Shot’ Campaign.  Thanks Eclectic Music for putting it forward!  It was mixed and finished off at the lovely Factory Studios by Anthony and is on air as we speak – have a look:

Audi R8 V10 Plus

March 18, 2013
commercial, sound design
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‘Evolution on the Outside, Revolution on the Inside’

Well I am sure that is the case… anyway I was asked by BBH / Rogue Films to record this car, going at 205mph on a rolling road somewhere near Manchester in a freezing garage.  I went on to mix the multitrack iso recordings and add some sound design and this is the finished result:

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I recorded the car with 6 different mics to capture different flavours of the engine: a dpa 4061 close to each exhaust on the chassis, a contact mic on the gearbox, an EV re20 under the floor (good for bass), and a mid-side pair of schoeps about 2/3 metres back from the car (far enough to avoid the heat) on a mic stand.  Everything had a -20db attenuator inline between the mic and the Sound Devices recorder.

Here’s Minnie my dog checking the kit list the day before:

minnieThanks to Minnie the shoot was a success other than cutting my hand on the chassis and one of my mics getting frazzled.

I worked on the sound design from my studio in Tooting, adding some details and using various plugins including Aphex Aural Exciter and Sountoys Decapitator to give the engine as much punch as possible.  I went to finish the online and tv mixes at the lovely Pure Soho and took stems to James Saunders at Jungle for the cinema mix, he’s got one of the nicest rooms in town and one of the best pairs of ears too, have a look at them here:

saundersMuch appreciation to producer Richard Adkins, creatives Olly Courtney & Tom Evans at BBH for getting me involved.  The film was directed by Mark Jenkinson from Rogue Films – look out for the tv cut and the cinema versions coming to a screen near you soon…

Silver Arrow!

November 27, 2012
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Sam Brock and I picked up an arrow at the BTAAs last night for The Guadian’s ‘Three Little Pigs’.  Was a great night and was nice to have our work recognised as I thought some of the other work nominated was fantastic.

Here’s the advert if you haven’t seen it:

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St. John Ambulance ‘Helpless’

September 17, 2012
commercial, sound design, tv
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So, a bit of radio silence recently but I have been away and also… I have been working at the lovely Factory Studios for the last few weeks – one of their engineers Anthony Moore took on a big project and they needed an extra pair of hands.

Last week I took over a job from Sam Robson for BBH and St. John Ambulance – cue a fair amount of music editing and a lot of to and fro-ing over the stuff at the end, and voila, a truly harrowing but worthwhile job.

It’s been one of the fiercest things I have had to work on, but its got a pretty strong message so I figure it’s a good one, check it out:

It was directed by Benito Montorio, created by Dan Morris and Charlene Chandrasekaran, and produced by Matt Towell – nice one everyone, and thanks Factory for getting me involved!

Guardian ‘Three Little Pigs’ wins a Cannes Silver Lion for use of sound design!

June 25, 2012
commercial, tv, updates
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I just won an award for sound design on the Guardian advert I worked on with Sam Brock from BBH!

Strictly speaking it’s silver but I am pretty pleased about it… it was a great project to work on and I am extremely grateful to Sam Brock and Davud Karbassioun at BBH for getting me involved.

If you don’t know what the Cannes Lions are, have a look here.

Directed by Ringan Ledwidge from Rattling Stick and written by Matt Fitch and Mark Lewis at BBH, its a cinematic twist on a well known fable, check it out if you haven’t seen it already:

Guardian – Three Little Pigs!

March 29, 2012
commercial, sound design
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I just finished the sound design and mix for this, check it out:

It was great to be involved from the start – building a sound bed from the storyboards before the film was shot, recording all the dialogue dialogue and sound effects, through to mixing the final tv versions and supervising the cinema mix (by Jamie Roden at Goldcrest).

I worked closely with Sam Brock (head of radio at BBH) throughout the creation of the sound design, initially recording dialogue with my location kit around London and working remotely from my own studio.  For the final dialogue recordings and sound effects work I dry hired a fantastic sounding Pro Tools room at Goldcrest Post attended by the whole creative team.

Nike – Hit The Target

March 29, 2012
commercial, sound design
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This advert was directed by Anthony Dickenson from Pulse Films, with visual effects work by Time Based Arts.

The sound effects work for this involved a lot of laser noise making, mainly using various synth noise generators, and the Ohm Force filter plugin ‘Quad Fromage’ which has a great comb filter.  The comb filter creates most of the metallic movement of the laser noises, blended with electricity fizzling and burning noises to give it that organic edge.

Other than all the synthetic stuff, I recorded a whole load of foley with Graeme Elston at Jungle Studios, and took it back to my studio for editing and mixing.  The foley was essential to give the film that hyper-real quality, and having lots of clean layers of sound gave me more control over the dynamics.

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I tried to blend the sound effects with the track by 16bit, so that hopefully the audience see them as one entity… anyway 16 bit are amazing producers, check their myspace!

Swatch – Move The Crowd

March 29, 2012
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This was directed by Chris Cairns for the danish Agency, ‘Thankyou’.  Chris and I have collaborated on quite a few musical projects over the years but this one was a bit different – the final work was always going to be written by Trentemoller (check out his stuff if you haven’t heard it, it’s brilliant).

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Initially I wrote a skeleton track for Chris so that we could time out which order his storyboards would be cut.  Mr Cairns’ idea was to link certain groups or individuals within the film with parts of the track, so with this in mind I created clear themes in the drums, bass and lead parts that would work with certain mechanisms within the film.  This initial skeleton was then passed on to Anders Trentemoller so he would have a template for the visual edit when composing the final music.

During post production and as I built the sound design elements within the film, the visual effects team (Time Based Arts) and I shared our work constantly.  This process helped generate some of the effects that were created, in particular the style of the digital reduction of the dancers.  A lot of the effects I made were using the Sonalksis bit crushing plugin amongst others, and the new GRM Tools plugins that came out in 2011 – they are quite obscure and can produce some fairly nasty sounds!