Embodiment

We and Serbian director Ced Pakusevskij had long been hankering for a passion project. So when Ced was asked to direct a short art film for fashion designer Barbara Bologna, the creative juices started flowing right away.

The film was a gripping sci-fi exploring big ideas, but the atmosphere and slick styling of a fashion film. Its concepts were solid, and the visuals spectacular, but the score had to match the styling and the aesthetic – cerebral, synthetic, dynamic. So we called up our friend Koen from Dutch band Klangstof, master of analogue synthesisers: perfect for forging unnatural, uncanny soundscapes, but with the visceral heft that only physical hardware brings. And we pushed the threshold in all directions, super-slowing down eerily quiet tones to add tension to the film’s most unsettling sections, while ramping up tempo and volume for its most explosive visual crescendos.

But that would take more than music. Our team also handled the entire sound design and editing. When the first draft needed a pretty dramatic cut, we dedicated months to piecing it all together again: meticulously splicing effects, music and images for the film’s most hectic and fragmented scenes. Bit by bit, frame by frame.

At the end of the day, we took a theme and made it sing, perfectly transposing a visual aesthetic to sound – as we always do. But this baby was the whole nine yards, the full package. With very little direction, we led this project from concept to completion: pinning down the core feeling with mood searches, supervising and selecting the score, creating all the effects and putting the whole damn thing together, right up to editing the final cut. You can call any job ‘cinematic’, but this was cinema – and we were running the show.