Justin Kooy is a sound designer & mixer at Sound Lounge in New York City. He recently completed work on a new media camaign for Converse that uses social media channels and noted celebrities to celebrate the cultural views that built the Chuck Taylor brand.
The “Forever Chuck” campaign is spread across Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook. The :06 videos are cut down from a larger scope of brand films in the campaign.
“I created an audio base for a bunch of short clips featuring various celebrities talking about their experiences with Chuck Taylor,” says Kooy. “This specific spot featured Millie Bobby Brown, star of Netflix’s Stranger Things.”
Kooy says he was given a handful of short clips that needed Web mixes. “Each clip ranged from :04 to :12 in length, and I needed to utilize the best, most engaging content for :06 spots on social media.”
Mixing for new media brings about new challenges for storytelling, says Kooy, who uses Avid Pro Tools. “The toughest part about mixing a :06 spot is the length — you have a very short amount of time to capture the viewer’s attention, to tell your story and to convey your desired message. It’s crucial the audio hits the mark to achieve any of these goals in such a brief amount of time.”
Kooy started by working on dialogue cleanup, making sure that all voices were as clean as they could be. “When you only have :06 to get your point across, you have to make sure that all of your elements are as crisp as possible!”
Music edits were also very important on this project. “You don’t have time to ‘let the beat drop’ in a Snapchat ad, so the climax happens on beat one,” he explains. “Once you have the music and dialogue in a good place, you put everything together and make sure that both are working in harmony.”