We begin surrounded by dark liquid, travelling into it as it becomes golden cola. Giant ice crashes around us, then liquid morphs into rocky landscape. We travel into a ravine. Giant thread races overhead from behind. We see from above - it’s lacing a leather seat in the cinema. We take our seat, a planet crashes into mercury which atomises – millions of particles rising within low gravity – they form a speaker cone. Driven by sonic booms, it throbs and ripples, passing around the diameter, over and behind us. The cone is broken up by sub bass and drops into black. A prick of light enlarges; we are looking into a projector. As we travel through the lens, faster and faster we pass the inner workings, beams of light, eventually we pass into pure white - it implodes in on itself, whereupon the VUE logo is formed in flames

Most UK cinema idents are fairly simple in their execution, the immersive journey the Vue commercial takes us on is fairly unusual – its main premise is to demonstrate the power and capability of a theatre system, in particular Dolby Atmos, which is still rare in UK theatres (something Vue are rolling out across their chain gradually) – people may not have heard an Atmos soundtrack where the sound travels in the ceiling of the theatre as well as the surrounds – the work is a unique demonstration of how sound can now travel in a 3D environment within Dolby Atmos Theatres. The work was built in this 3D environment and then re-worked after the Atmos mix, for smaller formats such as more standard 5.1 and stereo for online etc.

A growing pulse with added harmonies and eventually full orchestral risers forms the backbone of the sound design. The scale of the effects were supersized to strengthen the images: rather than moving water for waves, using thunder and foley recordings of chemicals frothing. Rather than ice sounds, using giant rock impacts morphed with electricity blasts. For the giant speaker we recorded springs with contact mics attached to tins to create the physical texture, then layered p51 mustang plane doppler and motorbike revs, double tracked with synthesised bass to strengthen the low end. We employed an overdriven 808 kick drum sub drop as the balls drop away - people giggle in cinemas as it tends to rattle light fittings ?. We decided in the end to mainly focus on the light sources in the tunnel section (live recordings of modular synthesiser modulations) and the pulsing synth that drives the rhythm.