Nike: Talking Trash - Genre hopping for sustainability

The Creative Brief

This project was part of a larger series by Nike called Talking Trash, which was a way for the brand to explore sustainability by talking with respected people in the field of climate science. In this film, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson talks with pop-star Billie Eilish about the role of the individual in the battle against climate change.

The direction I got from the agency (Godfrey Dadich Partners) was that they wanted the film to feel contemporary, fresh and fun. The motion design treatment for the film was playful and energetic, so we wanted the music and sound design to reflect that feeling. The goal was to take a conversation which might feel dry and give it a soundtrack that keeps the audience engaged without distracting from the important themes.

Developing the Concept

I tackled this project in two parts, first was establishing the musical language of the film. The references I received spanned a huge range from hip-hop to rnb to indie pop, so I wanted the music to reflect a diverse set of genres and styles. For each scene, the music needed to be in conversation not just with the motion design but also the topics of conversation and the rhythm of the edit. I let the edit pacing establish the tempo for each track, which helped to zero in on what genre made sense for each scene. From there, the topics and themes that emerged in each section helped to guide the emotional direction of the harmony. This approach led me to a laid-back, hip hop beat for the opening (Opener) and closing of the film while pushing me towards a more house-inspired groove for the section on climate science (Oceans).

The second part of my job was creating a sound design direction that was consistent and matched the playful nature of the motion design. I found an interesting contrast between synthesized bleeps and glitches for the more futuristic UI elements while introducing more realistic field recordings for the background imagery. The goal was to keep it minimal and not distract from the dialogue, but make it feel like a natural extension of the motion.

Iterating

The client and the agency liked a lot of the initial demo tracks that I sent over, so the revision process for this film was mostly centered around getting the transitions to feel natural and re-editing cues to match updates in timing and length. One cue that needed special attention was the climate-science section. The director wanted to give it enough variation while keeping the tempo relatively upbeat to ensure that it didn’t feel like it was dragging on. Every cue went through a few rounds of revisions to get the pace and feeling just right before client approval.

Takeaways

This project was a ton of fun to explore, it allowed me to explore my love of hip hop, electronic and indie-pop in a way that felt playful. Rather than trying to recreate the sounds from the reference tracks, I let the feeling of those songs guide me and I followed my own intuition in terms of sound design. The end result was a project that felt less like a film score and a lot like producing a pop-album for an artist interested in exploring the boundaries of genre.