Let It Go
Plastic Is The Problem // Innovation Is The Solution
Lightswitch
China // 70th Anniversary
Save Christmas
Rides // Safety
Behind The Source Documentary
Feel The BOOST
Who’s A Good Shopper
Chromecast // Tap Tap Boom
Infusions
Search B2B
China // Creators Unite
Dog-Grooming Pop Up
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Music Conception/Direction, Recording Supervision, Sound Design Supervision
The choice for ‘Let It Go’ was part of the idea and the script of the film. Which was great for me, because all I had to do was figure out how to approach it - both creatively and technically. It really was a behemoth of a project, this one.
Working with one of the most recognizable songs ever - one that most parents had heard thousands of times - comes with a certain amount of weight, as well as a number of constraints. There was only so much we were allowed to do to it, so the first task was to sit with the creative team and the director and figure out the sections of the song we wanted to feature on the film, and how they would connect to one another. To that end, I put together a musical treatment (similar to a director’s treatment) which described how the song should evolve within the film - and this is the structure that was executed.
Next came the aesthetics. We knew we wanted to re-interpret the song. So, I had to compile a list of world-class producers and music houses with the skill, reputation & experience to transform it into something fresh while still keeping the essence of it in place. Looking at the script and the director’s treatment, I knew that the overall style we were going for was leaning towards a Broadway Musical. After a couple of rounds of demos, we found the right partners to make this happen for us.
Given the stylistic route we had, I knew that I wanted to completely re-record the song with real instruments - which is what happened. The recording was done at Abbey Road Studios in London, with a 50-piece orchestra. It was as beautiful an experience as it was intense. Everything happened in one long day - from setting up the recording, to talking to the conductor and aligning on what we wanted to capture, doing the takes with the orchestra, recording Maisie’s vocals, selecting the best takes and mixing the chosen recordings with the chief engineer. I remember listening to the exports the morning after, and the music sounded quite spectacular.
Figuring out the sound design for this was also an intense and beautiful process. Since we were going for a theatrical quality with the activity of the shots and the people joining into the song, we had to do a lot of balancing of our ingredients - certain things had to be in the foreground in specific moments, but not all the time. And because we wanted to do justice to the quality of sound and execution of the song, we always checked to make sure we respect its wide dynamics. It was a lot of needle-work, but it ended up sounding and feeling great.
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Music Conception/Direction
The natural pace of the film was everything here. It was created entirely with found footage that was edited together into the narrative of the script, and everything was moving at an erratic pace. Finding the right music here was quite the journey.
Aesthetically, I wanted the exploration of styles to be all over the place. Some directions in my brief were: “imagine a college marching band playing a Timbaland vs Pharrell beat, and then imagine Timbaland & Pharrell sampling that back and making something new with it for this film”, and “imagine if Amon Tobin, Beatrice Dillon, Flying Lotus & Kara-Lis Coverdale formed an electronic Free-Jazz quartet and composed the soundtrack for this film”. I really wanted to explore uncharted musical territories by imagining unlikely meetings of styles, vibes and artistic approaches.
I wanted the arrangement of the soundtrack to feel the same: high-paced excerpts of seemingly full tracks which were stitched together in a manner and pace similar to the edit of the picture and make a complex result which is almost too much to follow at once, but it makes total sense in the bigger picture.
And that’s where the sound design came into play - every transition was boldly punctuated and tightly related to the picture, glueing everything together. Each of these sounds added to the complexity of the overall score, and they were mixed significantly louder than the music in order to bring the punctuation in the viewer’s face. And it all came together with the music and worked out great with the film itself.
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Music Direction/Supervision
In this project, we wanted music and picture to create a funny juxtaposition as commentary to what the world went through in 2020 and is still recovering from in 2021 - and it had to be done with grace, taste, humor and humanity.
Instead of crafting an overarching style and applying it across all the films, we wanted to serve the humor and emotion of each of them individually. To that end, each film was approached differently with regards to the music.
For Ahmed’s film, I wanted a track which is an original and legitimate Middle-Eastern gem from the past, and has infiltrated today’s music culture. As a fan of the reissues of Habibi Funk Records, I had to look no further than Al Massrieen’s excellent ‘Sah’.
In Family Drama we have a big build-up of tension and a release of indignant anger, illustrated by a sequence of slow-motion shots. I wanted to highlight the majestic theatrical quality of this sequence and get the joke out, so a classic Italian opera piece came as a natural route.
I approached the soundtrack for Cold Empanada as that of a love story film. And given the vibe of the picture, it felt appropriate to use some classic, warm, nostalgic Soul music for it. This choice of music achieved two things: first, it set the tone for a romantic scene about to take place. Second, it brought out the humor of the romance breaking mid-way.
Ode To Bares is a collection of funny situations with which everyone can relate to, and all of us had been missing. So I wanted to find a a score which highlights the cinematic value of those situations and the way they were shot and glues them together, and something which brings out the vibe of heroism and optimism which exists in the narrative.
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Music Conception/Direction, Sound Design Supervision
The main idea for this film was to summarise the journey of a nation from the point of view of the athlete’s personal journey of grind, determination and achievement. And the soundtrack needed to reflect that “we’ve come a long way” sentiment, as well as celebrate the “look at what we’ve achieved” narrative.
For this soundtrack, I wanted to take a left turn from the high-octane, high-energy music associated with sports brands. I wanted this to be emotionally driven and multi-layered, instead of it being driven by action and focusing on energy as much. So my creative approach went for a cinematic route - orchestral, elaborate, combining classical as well as modern elements, with a steady ascending build-up. These were the main attributes in my brief.
As soon as we established the violin as the main character of the orchestration, the rest was fairly straight-forward: we knew we had to break up the sections of the soundtrack in accordance to the acts of the film, so we experimented with key changes and layer additions as the story came to its climax. Being in the studio and mixing those string arrangements was an absolute joy.
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Music Direction/Supervision, Sound Design Supervision
There were three different films with three different stories in this campaign. And with each film, I wanted to explore a different trope from the past and present of cinema.
Since we knew that we were going to use iconic movie tropes, I wanted the soundtracks of those films to feel familiar and consistent with those styles. The conception involved some rounds of me deconstructing those iconic scores and figuring out what it is that makes them as recognisable as they became - in their instrumentation, their arrangement, and their relationship with the scenes they scored.
Family Moments has the most intricate brief to put together, with its two distinct parts. The second half was relatively straightforward: we knew there was going to be dancing and coordinated celebration going on, so my brief referenced modern musicals, both theatrical ones as well as movies of the genre. The first half was the interesting one - I wanted a ballad, early 90s style, but one which had exaggerated levels of sorrow to an almost comedic degree. Also, it had to be a song which conveyed heartbreak from separation - the lyrics helped a lot with that. Sound design played a huge role there - I wanted to have no music in the transition sequence, and really exaggerate the sound effects in that part. If you hear closely you’ll notice that we even added some cartoon sounds in there to completely turn the mood around.
With Saving Christmas, I knew the trope we wanted to reference was the high-tension and epic release one finds in superhero movies. However, because there have been multitudes of those movies along the entire history of cinema, I wanted to opt for relevance and briefed for a soundtrack which sounds more current than nostalgic - hence the choices of sounds and the overall instrumentation sounding more modern. The very pompous guitar solo is a clear tip of the hat to the 80s though, no question about that.
Crafting the brief for The Kids’ Party was an easy one: we went back to the 50s and tapped into the classic monster movies of the era, and created something referential to that. It was important to use techniques for lowering the perceived quality of the final piece, because what makes it sound so classic and recognisable is this grainy, lo-fi quality.
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Music Conception, Original composition
One of the few opportunities I had to compose something original for a campaign film. The stars kind of aligned in this project, because the whole team (and myself) were leaning towards a soundtrack which was stylistically compatible with my personal tastes and musical journey.
Taking the venue and its history as a starting point, what I wanted to do with this composition was to make a point of heritage and legacy, and at the same time maintain the contemporary aesthetic and musical innovation which has always been championed by the city of London.
So I tapped into the giants of modern UK music history: the distinctive basslines of early Drum & Bass records, the Aphex Twin’s atmospheres, the UK Dub roots since the late 70’s all the way till the present - and tried to blend those with the principles of what I heard coming out of establishments such as Deep Medi Musik & Hessle Audio. It all kind of came together naturally, in a matter of a day or two, and that’s what made it to the final film.
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Music/Sound Design Supervision
The challenge here was finding a music track that would actually make a video about Uber Safety fun to watch. We wanted to be adventurous and add some spice with classic 70s Funk. My task was to dial in the right amount of funkiness.
Funk music in cinema has been associated with a lot of heists, cons and overall reckless behaviour. So finding a slick Funk track to score a driving safety film without hinting to any of that was quite the challenge.
Everything about the candidate tracks had to be put under the microscope: their overall mood which had to be upbeat and positive, their energy levels which couldn’t be on the erratic side, the era they were musically referencing. I have to say, I discovered so much excellent music during this project - which is what it’s all about, really.
As soon as a track was found, cutting it over the picture was a very creative process. There is a very nice phrasing being played by the rhythm section, and I wanted to keep it as intact as possible. The “lullaby” part half-way was composed as an extra element on top of the existing track, in order to bridge things and create an energy differential that the film needed.
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On-Set Recording Supervision
This was a real DIY thing. Part of the HYF campaign involved us shooting and recording a short documentary, featuring the people behind the code who spoke about their stories. The entirety of this documentary was shot in-house, and on top of supervising the musical choices for the documentary, a task of mine was to set up and supervise the recording of the interviews.
During my Audio Engineering studies I learned that it’s always good to have a backup recording rig at hand. And thankfully, that was the case. When the lavalier microphone stopped working in the middle of shooting because of a broken cable, I had the large diaphragm condenser already placed and ready to go. After everything was captured, a little bit of post-processing took place and that’s what you hear on the film.
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Music Direction/Supervision, Sound Design Supervision
This was a big project, with a big team and multiple levels of collaboration. My job on it involved a few things: first I had to help the team figure out the musical ways of expressing the feeling of running. Then I had to consolidate every individual vision and, together with my own, turn it into a brief that a composer can read and understand what the direction is. Finally, I was the person who ensured that music and sound design fit together naturally.
The initial exploration of styles was an excursion to places far and wide. Before coming up with an original composition for the film, we looked at existing songs with their lyrical content as a main narrative element. Then, we explored all possible genres to understand what kind of energy levels we should aim for, as well as types of atmospheres and choices of instruments and textures.
I wanted the music for this film to feel internal, visceral and primitive. In a film about running, the runners themselves had to be the main instrument. For the overall vibe I wanted to replicate the meditative quality of having this unbreakable steady pace while running. Therefore, maintaining rhythm & tempo was the main focus point for the orchestration & arrangement of the score.
Putting the sound design together was not a trivial task at all in this project. The textures of the music and the sound effects were coming from the same sonic palette, and they had to sound distinct and natural while serving the narrative of the picture. So I wanted to make sure that the balance between the two was perfect in the mixing stage. It was quite a surgical process, but it was well worth the effort.
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Music Conception/Direction, Sound Design Supervision
These films had to feel funny, weird, and a tad “off”. To that end, I wanted my creative approach to “almost fit” the vibe - but not quite, kind of trying to blur the experience between the dog and the owner. I wanted the music to exist between the “generic” and the “almost too much”.
In Bones, I wanted to score an absurdly dog-centric space with music which kind of fits the aesthetic of that room: something super bright, dry, and with a lot of attitude. As a testament to the dog’s afro, Disco music was a main stylistic reference and I wanted it to be as exaggerated as possible - I remember half my feedback notes were “more disco toms please”.
For Scratchy, it was all about “bongos bongos bongos”. The aesthetic approach I wanted to follow when putting the brief together was the library record labels from the 60s and the 70s - so organic sounds, real instruments, and a lot of percussion. As soon as we landed on a main melodic hook, then we built really elaborate rhythms around it to the point that it was too much - and that was exactly what I wanted out of this. In my mind, the process of a dog being scratched is an overwhelmingly exciting experience for them, and that’s what I wanted the music to convey.
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Sound Design Supervision, Music Supervision
My first commercial project as a music creative, and a very enjoyable one at that. I was brought in because the team needed someone who could translate their creative vision into language that a composer or a sound designer could understand - and that was my task.
My role as the translator worked like this: I would receive input such as “this part sounds weird and confusing”, and I would then tell the engineer to reduce the stereo width of certain sounds so that the voice can come through cleaner. My creative partners would say “this part of the song does not have enough energy in it”, so my feedback to the composers would be to add some extra drum elements and open up the filter of the bassline in that part. That kind of thing.
My acquired terminology of audio engineering and musical composition as my trade proved to be quite valuable in that case, and by the final stages of the project I was conducting the mix sessions. Not long after, I would get more and more projects of that nature with increasingly more responsibility and creative input.
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Music Conception, Original Composition
The initial task on this project was for me to help clean up the VO recording, but soon after I learned that there was no music in place for it I had the idea to compose something.
I didn’t want to overthink this piece - in my mind, it was supposed to be a cradle for the narration and the enticing imagery & visual language, and not fight for any attention. It didn’t need a distinct build-up or anything like that either - it just needed to create an appropriate mood for what is being said and shown. It had to be something inviting, future-facing and optimistic.
Musically, I knew that I wanted to use modern textures and sounds with a lot of warmth on them, to fit the warm delivery of the VO. So I set those up in my instruments. I also knew I wanted to have a non-deterministic time and tempo signature. Once those rules were set, I just pressed play on the film and I reacted to the movements of the animation. And what I got to in the first couple of takes is what you hear on the film.
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Music Conception/Direction
Considering the specific visual language of this film, I perceived the visual elements as the main characters and points of attention. Therefore, I naturally gravitated towards conceptualizing a soundtrack which focuses on the themes of these characters almost exclusively.
I thought of two main routes: one involved a documentary-style score, and the second one was more geared towards narrative via texture - like a very well orchestrated field recording. We knew that sleek was a key aesthetic attribute for the film, and so the second route felt more appropriate.
The score was creatively approached as more of a sound design brief, rather than a purely musical one. I wanted to follow the movement of the shots - go really macro and scale everything up a bit, magnify the small, blow up the detail & texture, and find musicality within the material sounds.
The composition & sound design were pretty much merged during the development of this soundtrack, as both of them needed to be descriptive and musical at the same time while sharing many sonic textures. And the end result is quite pleasing indeed.
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Music Direction, Sound Design Supervision
In this project, the creative team were a bit stumped with the music (which was already being composed) and didn’t have a clear idea of how they wanted the song to progress along the film - so I came in to help.
Listening to the draft music for the first time, I liked the funky vibe of the bassline and the overall stripped down instrumentation. It sounded cool and it was serving its purpose for that particular film - the music had to be a simple bed that sits in the background throughout.
So my direction was oriented towards the arrangement of it: I remember listening to it and thinking of The Headhunters’ ‘Watermelon Man’, and the snappy rhythm guitar riff that comes in half-way through that track. I suggested adding a similar element to our score, and it worked nicely.
After that, it was a matter of mixing the elements of the music - bringing the keys down a bit, riding the drums a bit hotter at the 2/3 mark of the track, and overall maintaining that funky vibe without drawing much attention from what’s happening on the picture. The sound design and the dialogue of the clips featured on the film was the key here, so the music just had to support that and give a subtle shape to the narrative and the messaging. And that’s what it did, quite successfully.
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Music Conception/Direction, Sound Design Supervision
For this project, VAVA’s My New Swag had been picked beforehand as part of the film idea - and we wanted to remix it and tailor it to the film. And that was exactly what I set out to do - craft that remix.
Aesthetically, I wanted to take the track to a place where it lives somewhere between the maximalistic sound of M.I.A. and the rhythm of contemporary Rap music. At the same time, since it would feature in a 1 minute-long film, I wanted the energy to develop quickly and the sections to hit the edit really tightly.
Technically, it all went down in a generally standard remix manner: the stems of the song were available, so I had an Ableton session where I laid everything down. I picked the main elements I wanted to be more in the forefront (such as the percussive elements) and removed the ones which did not serve the idea. There was some sampling involved - I wanted to keep the beautiful traditional instruments of the original and re-contextualise them to where this version wanted to go. After a few days of fiddling, the basic skeleton of the track was born.
The version that ended up in the film was finessed and finalised in the sound studio, in parallel with the sound design which adds a lot to the narrative.
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Music Curation/Supervision
This was a fun project. I was brought in to curate a playlist for a dog-grooming popup, and soon I realized I had to kind of unlearn what I knew about music: I had to think about all of it from the dog’s perspective as much as possible.
The brief was “let’s find some music to play in the background while dogs are getting groomed”. Of course, it goes beyond that. The music had to be consistent with the aesthetic of the campaign, as well as the brand itself. And due to budget constraints, my playing field was the world of library music.
I like library music as a concept. Historically, looking at the likes of KPM, Sonor Music Editions and The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, some incredible music had been created which to a reasonable degree sparked entire scenes and genres. So this was not a bad starting point for me.
Of course, curating a list of music to be played in a public space is quite the task in itself. There are many factors to be taken into account: what is the vibe I want to create with this music? Should it attract attention or should it blend with the environment? Who is the main audience for this playlist? Answering those questions while pulling my selections made the playlist come together organically. My main selection criteria was: would a dog enjoy this music more than their owner?
I ended up turning entire music libraries upside-down, and the final curated playlist consisted of hundreds of tracks. And the verdict was that both the dogs who went to this pop-up as well as their owners were happy.
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Original Composition, Audio Mix
I was asked to compose and mix the music for our Amsterdam Light Festival project for 2019, which involved lights, kids, and the apocalyptic scenario of animals breaking out of the Amsterdam Zoo.
Before this brief became a real fun one, it actually was quite challenging to crack. Composing music which is supposed to represent (and ultimately be listened to by) children and doesn’t sound trivial, is not in itself a trivial task.
When putting demos together, I was trying to dial in the right amount of playfulness without sounding patronising, together with the correct amount of mystery and mystique without sounding subversive or threatening in any way. In the end, everyone was happy with the version that made it to the film - including myself.