We were asked to sound design and mix this ad for Habbo’s 15th anniversary celebration. The brief was to make it sound epic and huge, but also retain the humour and light-heartedness of the visuals.
So we went to town on the opening sequence, making the approach of the “whatever” sound huge, with rumbling, rattling and thunderous undertones of sub bass and even using distortion at times to convey the scale of the approach.
After the reveal, the tone lifts and there’s a lot more comedy involved with objects falling from the sky and hitting people, and then of course there’s the poking scene…
Designing sounds for animation is great fun – there is almost no limit to how far you can go in terms of creating interesting textures in audio. You’re not constrained by the paradigm of the real world, and so are free to make something that really fits the artifice of the world that’s being created.
When the sounds are designed and mixed properly, they provide a bedrock upon which the animation can sit and look “alive” without drawing any undue attention to the audio. The wrong sounds can totally break the illusion. A fine balance, for sure, and one that we’re constantly fine tuning.
