Shown both online and in the stadium, this advert for Huawei (wah-way) combined subtle foley and sound design with some serious sonic trickery…
We first found a track with a vocal hook that was fortuitously close to what we were after and then used a combination of sound design techniques to augment this to make it into a bespoke “wah-way” chant.
Firstly, real-time structural audio morphing was used to mould a crowd cheer using a spoken “wah-way” input. This morphed the crowd cheer around the recording – like an advanced version of vocoding often used in electronic music by bands such as Daft Punk and Kraftwerk.
We then had a football stadium crowd basically chanting Huawei “wah-way”, but the definition of the words needed to be stronger. To do this, again we recorded several spoken and clearly whispered “wah-way”, and these were layered like backing vocals to improve the definition of the crowd chant.
The end result was mixed with the original music track to create the bespoke Huawei music, and then the various foley and sfx layers were added.
The chanting at the end of the piece was also mixed in a similar fashion, and all the tonal stuff was pitched to be in key with the backing track.
