Sound Design Time: Wrigleys’ Rebel 5 – Stir Post Audio

July 10th, 2015 by David Weiss

Chew on this assignment: craft a mnemonic for five new spots in the 5 Gum global campaign from agency EnergyBBDO, “Life Happens In 5.”

Here’s how Amber Tisue, Senior Sound Designer and Mixer for STIR Post Audio in Chicago, handled the sound of life-changing events in the package which included: Getting a first tattoo (Tattoo), a first kiss (Kiss), skinny dipping (Skinny Dip), sneaking out a window to meet your teenage boyfriend (Sneak Out), and making your first entrance onto a stage as a soloist in a ballet (Stage).

Transmit: That “in your brain with heart pounding” feeling the characters experience when facing with their fears.

Tisue used a mixture of realistic environmental sounds and “loss of sound,” choreographed into a novel three-step sound approach to the sound design.

“At the beginning of the spot, there is the real-world scenario with natural sounds that set the scene,” Tisue explains. “Once the countdown to the deciding moment begins, the tension builds and sucks you into this headspace, a bubble, that represents time standing still—like when you’re on the precipice of making a life-changing decision and all you hear are the sounds inside your body: your heart pounding, heavy breathing, the kind of ringing in your ears you hear when you’re scared.”

STIR Post’s Amber Tisue quintupled her sound design fun with the Rebel 5 package.

Create cohesiveness during the countdown: Tisue layered in “effected natural sounds” of the environment that are featured prominently at the beginning.

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In “Sneak Out” a teenage girl climbs out a window while her parents are asleep. Tisue puts in the sound of the boyfriend’s car idling on the street below. Later, under the countdown, she uses the same engine with a designed effect to create a dream-like texture and a nod to the environmental sounds that came earlier in the spot which are still there in the scene, but exist now in the “bubble.”

To create the variety of sounds and textures needed to meet the creative brief, Tisue used a blend of sounds from her library and others she has created and collected during her 10-year career as a sound design artist. Tisue mixed the spots in Pro Tools, taking on a package of :15’s, :20’s and a composite :60 for corporate meetings. The spots were all mixed in 5.1 Surround Sound and Stereo, using Genelec 1030A’s and 5.1 Klipsch speakers.

Experiment to create the headspace: “At first I dropped everything out and put a muffled tone in there to create dimension while building the emotional tension of the pounding numbers on the countdown, but found that it took the listener out of the scene completely once the countdown began,” Tisue says. “So I had to find a way to keep the viewer in the moment, and I layered in natural environmental sounds but effected them to create more of a wash than a real environment, which really worked. To blur the line between what you hear outside of your head and what it feels like in your body before making an intense decision was the key and I feel we really found that balance.”

Full Campaign Credits

Product: 5 Gum – TV and Internet

Spot Titles: Kiss :15TV

Stage :15TV

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