Mouth party (for Sun and Moon Studios)

9th October 2019

E4 Party In Your Mouth from Nick Hales Animator on Vimeo.

For this spot by Sun and Moon Studios, I produced 4 dance tracks in different styles, that blended together over the animation’s trippy visual transitions.

Music

We start off funky at a fancy-dress party; then cross-fade into a piano-house rave; then there’s some intense drum & bass action, followed by a weird psychedelic rock.

Sound design

The challenge was to make sure we could transition from layer to layer of the mouth party without jarring the listener.

So the funk and the house music share the same tempo; the drum & bass and the rock music have the same, fast tempo; and rave air-horns (that fit both the raves) bridge the change in tempo.

I also did some filtering, and cross-fading audio into/out of reverbs, to further aid the transition, and suggest leaving one piece of music outside and entering another level of the party.

Because the animation was so mind-bending to produce – 4 nested, animated 3D models – the timing was necessarily locked down early in the process. We streamlined the process of agreeing the music a little, by making a rough-cut with the tempos and timings already in place. I was able to demo the music all from the same project, and worked with those timings all the way through to the final mix.

Mix

I produced the broadcast stereo mix to E4’s (EBU R128) standard.