The film is a significantly craft led series of vignettes stitched together in a continuous camera move, with sound design craft at the heart of bringing the worlds within the film together.

The work contains windows into 25 different examples of our environment and everyday life in the UK, broken down into 5x 5 vignettes titled: System, Love, Identity, The Land, Release. From a view of a family taking part in a Zoroastrial ritual in their home, children in the school playground, and a graveyard looking out to sea, the film is a package of cultural touchstones that resonate with the audience in the UK. Channel 4 set out to welcome and represent all aspects of British life and culture in this film which serves as a series of idents that bond the channel’s programming.

The viewer is taken on a continuous move through various locations that depict typical or unusual aspects of British life, from the familiar cornershop at the beginning, through the characterisation of aristocracy, religion and spirituality, surveillance and less human aspects influencing our life, from a girl’s bedroom to the office boardroom, a night out and the bedroom the morning after, scenes of rioting, a school playground through to a hilltop funeral site… all led by the beautiful words read by poet John Joseph Holt.

Situation:

Channel 4 idents / rebrand 2023 - a complete design and general aesthetic overhaul of Channel 4’s ident material

Brief:

To create sound design to help build the 25 different worlds stitched together in the film

Objectives:

To where possible focus on authenticity and realism in sound to support the narrative.

We supervised the on set sound capturing whatever actors we could wire up in addition to using an extended frequency range microphone to record the smashing of the glass in slow motion. We focused on crafting the sound joining the worlds e.g. the white noise of the rough sea morphing into the hot air fan, or the subtle moth flying through the graveyard tying into the moths in the glass box.

Getting the tone right on ‘Dinner Party’ was challenging. The sound had to be strong to project the right message but not so much that it stuck out too much. Eventually rather than obvious foley and sound effects, we settled on musical sound design for the impacts on the 4 logo, combined with Will’s reworking of Toccata and Fugue by Bach, reprogramming the music to merge its incoming pitch with the previous scene, and seamlessly into the next.