A few years back, I came across a commercial produced by my favorite local skate shop in Hilton Head, SC, Fuel Clothing. I was immensely inspired by the visual design that they had taken on, and couldn't stop myself from creating new sounds to accent the style. With help from a few other sound designers, we ended up creating the following bed of sound design…
In staying with the creative concept that Fuel owner Shane Gould had started, I felt it necessary to include the scripted lines that were included in the original. We decided to take a different approach to recording the voices and ran all of the recordings LIVE through a slew of processing and out to a 5.1 surround speaker setup. We would then have the talent say the same line over and over and over (yeah, they hated us) while we tweaked the gear in real time - adjusting pitch, panning, grain, delay, and so many other fun settings.
It was a crazy experiment that resulted in some really awesome effects and sounds. As you'll hear in the video below, some of the vocal sounds that we recorded actually ended up riding the rails of actually being considered more sound design than voice…
We loved the vibe the spot was giving off now, but felt that it wasn't complete, so we grabbed a couple axes (like in, guitar axes) and laid down some heavy guitar riffs to really beef up the energy of the spot.
All in all, we walked away from this project proud as hell for bending the sound design to a new level for ourselves. No work is more satisfying than one that challenges it's creators. Here's the final…
And just for fun, I've also included a version without the voices, as everyone at the studio was split on which version they liked best :) We agree to disagree, like a big happy family.
