Discord Sound Pack — Ft. Lil Yachty

•

Discord Sound Packs

Ft. Lil Yachty

Discord tests out its most wild program features every April Fools. This year, we're offering a slew of new sounds to replace notifications within the app — join a new chat room and have Lil Yachty herald your arrival, send a friend request and have the voice of a solicitous uncle ask you how you're game's going, etc. Along with my copywriter-coworker Mark Donnelly, I was charged with making a video announcing this new feature.

The idea of absurd SFX compilations made us think of 90s Megamix CD commercials, early internet pop-up ads, and dodgy compilations of .wavs/.mp3s downloaded off of KaZaA. From these ideas, we began to sketch out a storyboard.

My coworkers Mark Smith & Chelsea Park worked with Lil Yachty on recording a short welcome message. Mark spliced together different ad libs from Lil Yachty to make a short intro video, and from then on I added lo-fi graphics that cast him in the role of a chaotic computer program dwelling in a floppy disk that's about to be installed on Discord.

I created most of the graphics in Cinema 4D at deliberately low resolutions, turned off anti-aliasing, and imported them into Photoshop / After Effects for additional dithering. A good number of the 3D models (ie. the T-posing human figures, the frog, the horse, and the hellish screaming mouth) are from the defaults preset bundled into C4D itself, which were perfect for creating the mood of a chaotic malware.

Mark came up with the idea of sampling the different sound packs via a PS1-style character selection screen. I liked the idea and studied games like SSX, Star Wars Pod Racer, Virtua Fighter, FFX, etc. for inspiration. In C4D Xpresso, I rigged up a loading system that would simultaneously scale up and twist whichever character you're selecting. There's a bit of a time delay in the twisting that would lead to whiplashing (seen above).