Establishing A Reality In 8 Seconds or Less
Sound shapes the environments we see.
In a digital age, a consumer’s time and attention are key to getting their business. The faster someone can be hooked in to your product, the better your chances are of obtaining another customer. When we were approached to develop sounds for social media giveaway ads for Cash App, we knew time was going to be our biggest challenge.
ARRANGEMENT VIEW
The first thing we knew we had to do was establish where this animation was taking place. This is a useful technique for us to allow ourselves a benchmark for everything to follow. Once we can decide on a setting, we begin to creatively establish the rules of the world so we can begin assigning sounds to allow the scenery to come alive.
For the latest SCAF giveaway for April, the animation showed a cash symbol arise out of levitating furniture and house items. We decided this scene took place on an alien planet using gravity generators to keep everything on the ground.
THE MUSIC
The colorful imagery we paint for ourselves can lend its hand when it comes time to arrange music to the scene. The curved architecture and purple/pink color scheme add an atmosphere of sophistication to the scene, while the minimalistic arrangement of the room adds an air of simplicity. We took this into account and decided for April’s SCAF giveaway, we wanted to strip back the excess from modern pop production while writing music that felt fitting for the distant future’s most sophisticated penthouse apartments.
We started with kick and snare pattern to lay the foundation of the song. Working with a time limit of about 8 seconds, we decided this piece of music should feel like a complete idea from a much larger project. We determined that the beginning notes would serve as pick-up notes to lead into a chorus-like outro for a future-bass/R&B style track of the future. In those three pick-up notes, we were able to establish the key of the song by playing up the scale and bring familiarity to the listener for whatever was to come next. With the key of the song in place, we approached this section like an outro to a song: a piece of music to essentially wrap-up and re-cap the experience of listening to the entire song. With this context, we laid in some glitchy pluck synths to give the track melody and reinforced the bass line with a few ambient chords and tones. We wrote the bass line to be one of the driving sections of the piece. We were able to establish plenty of musical motifs from the rhythm section while simultaneously closing out a song with plucky leads and glitchy chords.
FEBRUARY SCAF GIVEAWAY
February’s SCAF animation shows shimmery rocks float up to create a cash sign. We utilized sound effects as the primary factor to build the setting with this project. We used sounds of rocks falling, dirt shuffling, vines twisting, bugs chirping, and palm fronds rustling to build a swampy, jungle environment. We added synthesized twinkles using a mix of chime samples and grain-delay modulation to make the shimmer of the rocks come alive.
The sound effects built the environment we were listening for but we needed a musical element to keep people’s attention. We wanted to use something that fit atmospherically, but did not overwhelm the listener’s experience. Ultimately, we used a tribal drum loop sample and processed it to feel like it was being played off in the distance. It was the final touch to create a captivating and immersive sonic environment in a few seconds.
SCAF VIDEOS BELOW
